Mormon Stories 1439: A Mexican Mormon Story - Gerardo Pt. 1

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin it is june 11th 2021 and today i am super excited for this interview because we are literally interviewing one of my favorite humans on the planet and that is why i'm excited and that is why i hope you can just trust me have faith in me that this is going to be um a really important and powerful epic mormon stories interview today we are interviewing gerardo sumando hello gerardo how are you doing yeah i'm doing great how are you did it are you embarrassed and i embarrass you a little okay we're good so why is gerardo one of my favorite humans because he's awesome but there are so many cool things about gerardo if you notice the amazing cinematography the camera the lighting the backdrop all of that is the work of gerardo he has upped our cinematography game on mormon stories podcast yes but that but that is the least believe it or not that is the least of why gerardo's uh so interesting and important um gerardo is smart he's funny he's interesting he's wise and he has an amazing mormon story uh believe it or not as strange as it is we're like 2 000 hours into the life history of mormon stories podcast and i don't believe we've ever interviewed a native mexican uh correct me if i'm wrong is that is that right as far as you know gerardo yeah born and raised in mexico but what's just bizarre about that is that the the outside of the united states i think mexico and brazil are the two countries with the highest uh population of mormons and so getting a native someone raised in mexico in the church that's just a super important mormon stories podcast that that is begging to be done so today we're going to do it we're going to be interviewing gerardo who was born and raised in mexico spanish is his native language english is his second language and um so that in and of itself is super important but there's also so much more um you know we're going to be talking about gerardo's faith journey we're going to be talking you know he has a lot of wisdom and insight he studies you know mormon mormon truth claims in mormon history probably more closely than i do so he's got a lot of interesting things to say about mormon apologetics mormon history mormon truth claims all of that so that's going to be fascinating just to get his perspective not only as a mexican but also as a super thoughtful human he's younger so there's kind of the gen z millennial kind of perspective but for all these reasons and then again plus the faith crisis stuff and the um apologetic stuff and the truth claims stuff today is going to be just one of those heartfelt gripping epic powerful mormon stories interviews so gerardo what did i leave off um nothing i think it was great it was a great intro and of course we uh we want to uh introduce and welcome back to our podcast uh cara burrell hey karen hey hey all right hey john thanks for joining us yeah i'm really excited to be here me and hart are basically like co-workers at this point setting up all this stuff making this work so i'm really really excited for this one this one's going to be epic and we got you a better camera yeah i hope everyone smile at the camera [Music] yeah if you're listening on the podcast make sure you go check out the youtube video on this one heard of spent so much time setting up this camera equipment everything it looks very cinematic yeah and just uh just for those who are joining us kind of for this episode but haven't been listening recently it's been so great to bring kara on she does so many things behind the scenes this is something for everyone to know and forgive me for kind of this longer introduction but we really do need to educate our audience about this one of the investments we've made thanks to your generous support is we're now putting time codes in all these youtube lengthy youtube episodes so we've had a lot of people say i don't want to watch a four or five hour or eight hour interview but i want to be able to consume some of this stuff and maybe jump to the parts that are important or i want to be able to refer people to parts of the interview without making them watch the whole thing so there's a couple things that we've been doing with your support one is we have the understanding mormonism youtube channel which is a separate channel from mormon stories podcast brooklyn alden has been managing that she does our video and audio editing and we've been releasing shorter smaller chunks of interviews on understanding mormonism so you can consume smaller pieces of these interviews but also what we're now doing is releasing time codes in the description of our youtube channel of our lengthy episodes so that you can see and jump to the parts that you want to jump back to them to remind yourself refer them to others but all that takes time so kara is meticulously noting time codes and different segments of the interview as she's being here she also monitors the audio and video to make sure audio and video is clean and provides valuable insight uh with her perspective and sometimes even humor so for all those reasons kara it's we're just so glad to be able to have you on board that's really nice thank you john and now we can blame you if the audio or video is bad it's kara um that's very true i will absolutely take that off of your shoulders john all of the blame is on me and i should also add that uh one of the biggest complaints sometimes is that the the episodes are a little bit long and it's hard for people to jump to and now with our tick tock channel on mormon stories tick tock it's up to 23 000 followers now with lots of short segments and stuff so the information and the stories are being disseminated better than ever before so all of the donations we're making sure that all of these interviews the information is really getting out there and stretching those donations as far and wide as possible so yeah yes and i and and thank you for reminding me because again this is a lengthy intro but it's super important we asked kara to start the mormon stories podcast tick tock channel just like two weeks ago and we've already got like 20 shorts up there some of them have been viewed half a million times just three shorts that cara released like within 24 hours of yesterday have in aggregate obtained a million views just three and and again like kara said shout out to the mike cells and kyle ashford and the just the recent interviews from the last few weeks the more interviews like gerardos that we're going to be doing the more little clips we'll have and i think that draws more traffic back to listening to the long format and the context involved and just getting more viewers and people's stories and more interest in what's going on in the world of mormonism is always helpful at making change and helping people progress through their deconstruction if that's where they're at in life so all over i think it's really a positive uplifting helpful thing that we're doing so absolutely so thank you care for that and gerardo you and i were talking about this as well because this we're kind of a team us three in brooklyn we're kind of the mormon stories open stories foundation team right now along with our board of directors but gerardo we were talking about this there's part of us that's like oh wow the okay the cool thing about tick tock is that it reaches younger audiences and not just younger people like old old middle and young tik tok is a huge deal so that's cool to be able to um sort of like reach new groups of people but then we're also geraldo you were mentioning this like oh my gosh do we do we want to be responsible for triggering a faith crisis of a 14 year old especially if their parents aren't super friendly to a faith crisis right and then we also just talked about it and it's like do teenagers deserve informed consent like before you are going to serve a mission if you're gay and yeah you know are you going to go into a mixed orientation marriage or if you're a woman and you want to become a scientist but the church is saying be a mommy like do teenagers deserve informed consent and i you know it's it's mixed because we're actually not trying to start a faith crisis for anyone actually but we do want to provide people with information if it would be helpful to them and and we you know what'd you think when we talked about that yeah it was just the idea like i i think you you mentioned that wouldn't you would have one wanted to know earlier on that what you know now and yeah probably i would i would so so yeah i think it's something we're trying and and it's going really well and i'm excited about it yeah yeah so lots of good things happening again we couldn't do without your support and and we couldn't do it without you gerardo with you kara with you brooklyn and with the open stories foundation donors so so many good things now without any further ado time for a new time code we're going to actually start this interview so gerardo sumano you have a mexican mormon story and where should we begin yeah so um i was thinking maybe we can start by um talking a little bit about the what i i don't know a lot about it but just the history of the church in mexico specifically um from what i understand uh the church arrived in mexico in the late 1800s uh but it didn't really start growing until the mid 1900s um so it took several like 50 60 years for it to start actually growing at a faster faster pace um it really picked up in the 1950s uh 60s especially with david mckay it's just the numbers were doubling every five years and yeah the church grew super super fast um and do you know when the mexico temple was built would it have been built during the david mccair i think so i think so too yeah i'm not one of the early yeah temples outside of the us yes yes um yeah one of the first things that the church did around i think it was the 60s was building this uh high school huge high school like what do you call them here in the us when when students go and they actually live on campus in high school yeah kind of kind of like a boarding school yeah yeah it was in wasn't it in mexico it was mexico city yeah i think they had some in uh northern mexico but the big one less colonias right yeah the political colonies colonies yeah the polygamy colonies came from yeah the brigham young era where he sent people uh from aries that were living in arizona um to to kind of like move to mexico so they wouldn't be persecuted because of polygamy uh that's 1860s and 70s yes yes right like five years before the manifesto was when they started moving oh 18 1885 then yes okay yes um yeah but even there like the church was not growing it was mostly americans who had moved to mexico and it was like their own thing and mexicans would see them as like this weird people you know that live polygamy um anyway but this the benemerito was this huge high school uh now it's been closed uh now it's it's what they make made it into the mexico city mtc um and that's in mexico city yeah but for the longest time uh mormon families would send their children to to this high school and they would grow they would go to high school and grow up in this super conservative mormon boarding high school so that helped a lot to the growth of the church especially in that area so there was a real excitement at the time uh my i'm gonna talk about this a little bit more later but at the time my grandma converted to the church in in the 70s there was a real excitement in mormonism and just there was this peculiar people that had this fun activities and and that they would do the cultural activities on on weekends and stuff and just like a cool um and interesting community to be part of and so many people were getting baptized of every um social class so rich people middle class people they were getting baptized and many of these families have continued for generations in the church in mexico so mexico was conquered by spain and basically the catholic church ruled um in mexico for a long time so even after the independence yeah it came with the separation of church and state came but um but everyone in mexico is catholic and [Music] not everyone but most people are catholic it's the most prominent religion in mexico just because that that's i mean we were conquered by them basically um and the native indians were forced to be converted to to catholicism so um yeah it's a very catholic country um but yeah even with that the church was able to to grow super fast and uh we have i think a lot of it had to do with this very strong and powerful message of uh you know in the mcconkey era where like we would talk a lot about the apostasy and the great apostasy and like trash the catholic church and say how they're all wrong because they do this and that and they do baby baptisms and non-consent and that doesn't count so so that made that that approach i think really helped the church grow really fast uh was part of it uh they approached people crashed on infant baptism on sprinkling on sprinkling versus immersion right on on in the book of mormon talks about the great and abominable church and yeah and my conscience said that the catholic church was the great abominable church of the devil yeah in mormon doctrine right they took that out i mean listeners those of you were into this stuff will know this but those who aren't literally mor first edition mormon doctrine called the catholic name to the catholic church as the church of the devil yeah right yeah yeah yeah so that helped a lot like just this very strong approach like you're in the in the the wrong religion and you have to be here with us it's a way to differentiate the market right yeah yeah it carves out a market space for those who don't like catholicism mormonism is your is your religion because we're the non-we're the anti-catholic kind of yeah right right institution yeah and i used a lot of those arguments during my mission and really worked so is there anything to do with like people are interested in the way that the book of mormon took place perhaps oh yeah so that was the big yeah yeah that's good you mentioned it that's huge because mexicans till this day they're taught that they are the the literal descendants of lehigh so so in the book of mormon yeah i still get goosebumps of that really yeah missionaries would come and tell you like this book was written by your ancestors and um it was just this very emotional thing and that we um that we were able to have this record that we didn't know about that was talking about people that that that lived here and that we are descendants from basically telling you your identity yeah right yeah your origins right and and this idea too you know the book of mormon talks a lot about um the the lineage and and the fact that um you you come from the linea so i don't know i grew i grew up knowing that we mexicans are the literal descendants of the house of israel while americans are just adopted the pure blood of israel right right you were the you were the pure bullet right right um so so yeah and laminita would be how you identify yeah we're lamanites yes yep we're the lamanites that's why our skin color is brown um i mean that's explained that's in the book of mormon that uh where he explains that um so basically you're the chosen pure blood of israel right right and us white people aren't right exactly yeah yeah so in some ways even though you're kind of uh you know the united states might say oh it's a lesser developed country or whatever yeah but you guys are the pure blood of israel you're the ones who the book of mormon was written for yes you were the you were the main right yeah the principles um yeah principles ancestors were the ones that um yeah lived in america yeah and uh and we'll come back to that yeah okay yeah tell us how you really feel uh so no but i just you feel special like i i remember serving latin america it's the feelings are so polarizing now because i know you have strong emotions about this now but i think you'd also admit that at the time you felt there was so much pride in latin america to be a lamanite right yep well and the book of mormon talks about our history about america getting conquered uh by the gentiles and the lamini and it just talks about our history it's the right there in the book of mormon so yeah just a very exciting thing [Applause] but for some reason i mean and it probably it wasn't just a mormon church by by the 2000s the church really the the growth stopped to being so accelerated uh so it started slowing down while you were a child there um yeah yeah around the 2000s uh i would stay by that by 2000s most of the families that were being baptized were lower middle class or poor people um and by 2010 the growth really really really slowed down was the activity rate in like the wards and stakes also flatlining yeah yeah activity raid just went down like crazy like collapsing stakes like i've heard in like chile and yeah i'll talk a little bit about about that that is still happening it was no i don't think we had issues like chile had where like jeffrey hahn had to go and close so many stakes but they're doing it right now more on the down low and like mixing steaks right now um putting um closing down steaks and merging them um they're doing that a lot now in mexico and are you bringing this up to kind of set the context for your upbringing then by the time you're paying attention yeah the church is starting to slow its growth is that why you breathe right okay right yeah uh because what i grew up in in this time where like a lot of strong families were in my word but not many people getting baptized and the people getting baptized were not staying so i but then but i also grew up hearing the stories about my parents going to oaxaca and baptizing hundreds of people but i i never saw that and it probably was also i grew up in this very catholic state another thing that i wanted to talk about is how mormons see mormons in mexico see mormonism and they will have this very folksy belief in mormonism um you're talking about the members of the yeah members members in in mexico they're very conservative religious solids most of them super conservative it would be really really weird to see a progressive mexican mormon most of them will be very very religious or maybe like inactive like sometimes they just stop going but not nothing like you see here in the us where like they know the history but they still like going and they kind of try to uh make it work like nothing like that um most members in mexico are um have a very folksy view of mormonism so they won't know about polygamy they won't know about the hat and stone um truth claims nothing about book of abraham yeah um and probably won't care about lgbt people oh yeah feminism yeah mexico it's pretty it's a pretty homophobic country i would say um same-sex marriage has been legalized in a lot of states but on the state i grew up in it's still is still illegal so um so yeah that doesn't help also i mean you know one of the most shocking race experiences of racism i've ever had was as a missionary in guatemala and it was guatemalan on guatemalan in other words it was a lighter-skinned higher class guatemalan talking down to what she would have called an indio someone who was a lower class less educated with darker skin it was just blatant hateful racism right in front of my eyes and i never realized how much just like with india the colonization led to some serious racism and i don't know is that true in mexico yeah it's 100 yeah the classes are very very marked and undivided um my skin color and education yeah yeah so i think we can start now with my my my my parents story how they joined mormonism and my parents have a really interest both of them have a really interesting conversion stories um so i'll start with my dad my dad grew up in mexico city and he grew up super poor um like as a very poor family with five siblings um and he grew up like as a very early on in as a child having to go out and sell on the streets um jello or like um just going to the market and peeling fruits and and stuff like that to make some money and bring home uh money so that's kind of the low not the lowest cost but pretty you know lower class super super low cutting fruit in the market you know that's yeah yeah my dad grew up super super poor um sometimes not having enough for food and stuff like that so yeah um and all of his siblings grew up that the the same way um he but he ended up going to college and got a degree in industrial engineering and when he got his degree he moved out from home and moved to a city close by mexico city and that's where he found out about the church so how it happened was he he was working at an office and then i think a new secretary was hired or an admin and i think between the co-workers they kind of made bets on who would be the one to approach her and try to date her um so i think it was my dad's turn or something so he tried to approach her and um trying to make her make her his girlfriend uh but he she she didn't really had any interest in him so like he would tell her like let's go to the movies on on uh on sunday she really i don't go out on sundays or like let's go drink coffee and she's like i don't i don't drink coffee and so finally he ends up finding out that she is more men and not just mormont she's the bishops um daughter so at the end he ends up convincing her to kind of like date but she was not taking it seriously because he was not a member of the church and he could kind of see that and her birthday was approaching and the night before her birthday uh my dad went and to the missionaries who lived right next to his um to his apartment and he knocked on the door and told them hey missionaries my name is whatever and i why i i want to get baptized tomorrow and this was after work this was night like the missionaries were already home and and it's a golden golden prospect right right the missionaries told him like i well we need to teach you some lessons and make sure you're prepared for your baptisms and for your baptism and my dad told them well if you don't baptize me tomorrow you're never going to baptize me in your life ever so um it's your decision so i think they they did a call or something maybe to the mission procedures that they got authorization so they just taught him the the interview questions and they baptized him the next the next day um and right after he got baptized he was called he didn't even know what the book of mormon was when he got baptized but his first calling was seminary teacher and it was the book of mormon class so um so that's when he learned what the book of mormon was and then at some point uh his girlfriend decided to go on a mission which is not very common for women yeah back then to go on missions um but she decided to go on a mission he said okay i'm gonna wait for you and and i think they agreed on him waiting and so then she would come back and then marry but um and my dad was called as a branch president during that time whoa yeah he was in this like really small branch but he had like really got a good education he was a smart person and he liked the church he was called as the branch president this is in dfa federal yep uh no it was not dfa i think it's a city close by okay yeah near near mexico city yeah yeah and anyway so she comes back and she tells him hey you know what um i can't marry you because when if i marry you and when we have children and we have to tell them to go on their missions um they're gonna be able to tell me well why would i why do i have to go if my dad didn't go so so she so and she told him and i know because i'm telling you this you're going to go on your mission but i just want you know i'm not going to wait for you um but so the stake president i think told my dad well now that you can't you you're not gonna get married um you can't be the branch president uh for too much longer we would rather have someone that's married so you either have a choice of finding someone else or going on your mission so he he was 26 at the time and he decided to sell everything he had and go on a mission and he was called to oaxaca mexico which is probably one of the poorest states if not the poorest state in mexico and the church was not super big in oaxaca at the time so while he was on his mission he was able to open a lot of new areas and uh start a new a lot of new branches that later became stakes and wards and stakes have you talked to your dad about what his testimony was like because the i think in my mind i stereotype or stigmatize someone who joined for a a romantic interest that somehow that's an inferior way but the truth is that's a really common way people convert it's one of the most common ways but then of course the testimony ends up growing that's just kind of the spark so have you ever talked to your dad about like what is testimony because to to like go on a mission in your mid-20s and to sell everything that's right that's what i was wondering too like did he talk to you growing up about how his testimony bloomed through all this or anything um because especially when he's told he's not going to get the girl right well then you'd think he'd bail but he doesn't right so he must have had yeah he loved the church he liked the church and he was an avid reader like i read the book of mormon several times he believed it was true and he wasn't in the true church oh he was here's the other thing my grandma my grandparents were really catholic so when he told when when he told them that he was gonna convert into mormonism and then even going um into his mission they um they she my grandma basically shunned him they she told her you can't come here to the house anymore and pretty much you're not our family mm-hmm um it was it was well for for a lot of mormons would be a faith crisis like when when one of their children would lose their faith that's i feel like that's how my grandma felt that he was living leaving the catholic church so i think a lot of those experiences make you really hold tight to your decision of changing church churches or religion and that maybe was part of it and also just he he loved it um but on his mission was when he really really converted and he became a really really orthodox mormon during his mission he was made he worked in he was i don't know if you say call but he was called to be a secretary in the mission really soon uh did he have a mac do you know if he had a mexican mr president uh yeah he he had a mexican mission president and he was a very very conservative mormon orthodox mormon he's mission president so that's where he got it from and then he was an ap for a long time too i think around six months or something like that um so yeah he just uh really his testimony really grew during during that time i grew up hearing his mission experiences like this super magical and incredible experiences of baptizing a lot of people and super strong spiritual experiences um and but that wasn't enough to get the girl though right yeah that was that was enough um anyway so i'm gonna stop there with my dad's story i'm gonna come back to my mom so my my mom from what i understand she was around five years old when my grandma she was a single mom she had recently divorced or separated from my grandpa uh i think that one of the main reasons was because he was an alcoholic so my grandma was raising five children my mom being one of them uh by herself and my grandpa did help a lot on with the money so he he never just left them and didn't take care of them they he actually did take care of them and when my mom was around five years old my my grandma saw the missionaries walking like these american missionaries and call them my grandma during his childhood she had um she had a huge fascination for the english language so she learned english from from very young age um going going to classes and stuff that's for what i understand and so when she saw american missionaries she called them and asked them what they were doing and that's when uh right after that my grandma and her four four of her five children converted into mormonism anyway so from what i understand also like there was a school uh for for mormons in in merida well my where my mom grew up and so my mom went to like elementary mormon elementary school and anyway so she grew up in the church loving it um it definitely helped my grandma a lot with raising her kids and to being moral good good people and at some point some a couple from idaho falls were visiting merida and they went to my grandma's ward and this couple my grandma because she knew english she approached them and started talking to them and they became friends and they told my grandma okay you have two daughters and we would like to offer you for have ha to have your daughters come to the u.s learn english and just see what the culture is to learn more about the church and to see how the churches lived in in in the us so they offered over that and so my my mom she was a teenager to live with them i was like yeah like as an exchange student yeah so my mom and her and her um sister they they came for for a summer to see how it was i lived in idaho falls and and they liked it so my um my aunt came first for the first year and then she went back to mexico and then my my mom came and she lived with them for a year and she didn't know any english and when when she came but um what's what exchange programs are for so she yeah she she learned english and and loved it she loved the us loved the culture and that's when she really learned how mormonism should be lived that women actually go on missions um that marriage should be uh like a priority uh family home evenings and just um yeah i mean shelley i don't know mormon family yeah super devout mormon family yeah from shelley idaho so oh i don't know she went to shelly high school okay um but yeah and she after that she went back to mexico and so this family their priority was well they told them you're going to come to the u.s but after the year after your visa is done you have to come back you go back to mexico you can't stay here so my mom went back but she loved the us so much um i don't know a lot about this but she was able to meet a family from arizona and they offered her for to come for another year so she came back and lived here with another mormon family in arizona for another year and then moved back to mexico okay she was 20 when she decided she was dating this guy in mexico in merida uh a member of the church and she really wanted to get married um because she'd seen it right like here in in in the u.s how mormons get get married super fast and that that's how it is um so she really wanted to get married and she asked this guy hey so what should we do should we get married or should i go on a mission and he was a return missionary and he told her well you should ask the lord my mom was like ah no that's not the answer i want she was like take me now right is that what you mean yeah yeah uh so i think she kept asking him for a couple a couple times like what should we do should we get married or should i go on a mission every time the answer was ask the lord so she finally decided to pray and ask the lord if he if she had to go on a mission and this is when she had her first and mo her her first super powerful spiritual experience i would say and i i've heard my mom tell this story so many times where she went into her room with her scriptures and she kneeled and asked god um god do i do i need to go on a mission and she opened her scriptures and i mean this is not my story so i don't remember the scriptures she read but she the first scripture she read was this scripture about about mission service and she was like okay this has to be a coincidence this can't be so she closed her scriptures and prayed again and asked god to tell her do i have to go on a mission and she opened the scriptures again and another different scripture about mission service and she still was reluctant she was like no maybe this still is a coincidence she closes the scriptures prays again and opens it and another scripture about mission service and that's when my mom she said she started bawling and she's like i have to go on my mission um and by that point my my my mom is the youngest of all of her siblings so she was the only one left living with my grandma and when she told my grandma my grandma told her like don't go on your mission they're going a mission um i i don't want to stay alone i'll buy you a car if you stay whoa that's the opposite of what we get here in the states right um and my mom my grandma was was really mormon like she she loved the church but it was not a thing for for women especially mexico to go on missions but she was called to oaxaca too and same mission as my dad and she had a really hard time her first uh months on the mission i mean it was a it's a very poor state um having to walk on the sun and super steep hills and she was i think she was about to come back like really early on on her mission she's like this is not for me um but at some point i think well she she ended up deciding to to stay and and complain she had a lot of success uh and she was the highest baptized baptizing missionary for for several months um and yeah and my parents didn't really talk when even though they served on the same mission at the same time they really talked my dad i think he was already an ap or something when when she arrived or something like that um but she knew who she was but they they never really talked one thing i'm curious about is um the proportion of gringo gringos to you know mexicanos in the mission at that time you probably don't know the percentage distribution but that that was always we we might end up talking about that during your mission yeah kind of like the the gringos versus the natives was a was kind of a big deal yeah yeah no there there was a weird and i think they've said it before that it was weird how balanced it was between hispanics and american missionaries yeah but there was no american sister missionaries most if not all the sister missionaries were latinas that that was something interesting yeah but because there still wasn't a thing here yeah for girls to go yeah maybe just in like very conservative uh and i think most of we're being called to europe and stuff like that i don't know what year are we talking about here again um the 90s early 90s um anyway so the la so my dad was about to finish his mission and on the last tour with the mission president um where they had to travel and and go and visit the missions and for the zone conferences on the ban it was the mission precedent and the two aps the two ips just like my dad the other ap just like my dad had already he had a career already he was around the same age as my dad so older and so the mission president told them elders um when you go back to your homes um you can't go back to fool around and you you have to go back and know who you're gonna marry and marry them fast uh and you are gonna marry one of my daughters and you're like what do you mean your daughters your daughters are are young it's like well the sister missionaries that's what that's what i mean and you're gonna ask me about any any sister missionary you want and i'm gonna tell you about their personality and anything you want to know about them and how your life is going to be if you marry them so basically the mission president's playing the role of matchmaker like yenta and fiddler on the roof and he's basically trying to matchmaker matchmaker and he knows all of their transgressions probably too right right and my parents have said that that was one of the focus on my uh of that mission president uh to marry a lot of couples of that had served in the same mission at the same time so a lot of couples came out of that that time and and that mission anyway so that whole tour he they were just asking what about this sister what about this sister and he would you just tell him and on his last interview right before he was gonna go home um the mission president told him okay elder sumanov you are you are gonna tell me um three sisters that it can be the ones that we already talked about you can ask me any more questions about any other you want but you have to give me three and you're gonna go and try to marry the first one if it doesn't work you're going to go on the second one and if it doesn't work you're going to go to the third one if the third one doesn't work you're going to go back to the first one but you're not going to deviate from those three so my dad named the one two and three my mom ended up being the third one [Laughter] and my mom was still on the mission and he went back home and he went back home to nothing he had literally nothing because he had sold everything to go on his mission um but he started contacting this sister missionary she he started with the first one the first one rejected him and the second one i can't remember what happened but he decided to go straight to like to the third one to my mom um and they've had some communication after my dad had returned from his mission because my mom had already returned to her to merida and then my dad finished her his mission so some of the some investigators that my dad had in in oaxaca in his last months there uh were moving to merida where my mom was from so he started sending them her letters like hey can you take care of these investigators who are moving to merida and just shove them around show them where the church building is or whatever so yeah they have had a little communication through there um so my when my dad came back tried the first one didn't work and then he flew to merida to see my mom and just really quickly tells her um i want you to marry me and my mom at that point was already dating someone but that someone was not proposing and she really wanted to get married so she said yes i'll marry you i mean you are elder sumano everyone like knows who you are and from our mission and you were a good missionary you were the ap by the way i have a dear friend steve caldwell who served in a mission with your dad shout out to steve and mindy and steve remembers your dad and really wants to meet with you because he has such fond memories of knowing your dad yeah so your dad must have made a mark because a friend of mine remembers your dad yeah a hundred percent i think my dad did leave a mark there um anyway so she said yes my dad goes back to mexico city because he he had already found a job there and the original plan was that they were going to get married and they were going to move to mexico city but at some point they decided no merida is a way safer city i think it was when my dad visited merida and he was just amazed by how beautiful of a city it is how safe it is and just a great place to raise kids so they decided okay we're going to move to merida but then that meant that my dad had to find a job there um and there was only like a three month period in between when my dad my my dad proposed she said yes and and then getting getting married um i think just days before the wedding he could still couldn't find a job but my mom was like well if you can't find a job i don't think we can get married um but i think he's told this this experience a couple of times where he prayed and told god like hey i already did what you wanted me to do and went on my mission i served you i i need you to make this work and he found a job just a few days before the wedding um a really good job and so they ended up getting married in trouble in the temple in mexico city and then the party was in merida and so people were probably excluded right yes so my all my dad's family who are not members either catholic um how would a how would a mexican catholic family receive the news i mean weddings i'm guessing are a big deal in mexico maybe even more so than here i don't know but how would a catholic mexican family receive the idea that they actually can't attend the wedding i think it was devastating and i miss this part this important part of the story where my dad my grandpa my dad's dad died while my my dad was serving his mission in oaxaca and he went he just went back to the funeral went to mexico city and just i think couple days and went back to his mission finished yeah he attended the funeral that's unique because most missionaries don't get to go home yeah yeah the the mission president told him i mean he knew about his situation like super catholic family um they were already disappointed that he was on a mission preaching against the catholic church and and then his dad died um so i just i just want to drive this point home for non-mormon listeners it is normal for a missionary a mormon missionary to not return home when loved ones die and to be told you need to stay on your mission i had two grandparents die i didn't go home to see either of their funerals i just stayed on the mission my brother got married while i was on my mission i didn't go home i missed my brother's wedding so i just want to that's just a weird thing about quirky mormon mission culture but yeah when i went on my mission got to go yeah when i went on my mission my dad told me if i die don't come back just finish your mission really yeah anyway but he just went back for a couple days and then so so my grandma was already hurt like he had left them after my my grandpa had just died and she was a single mom with five other kids um just yeah i just yeah so i think it was devastating for for her and my dad says that he never he didn't really their relationship didn't get better until i i was born so two years but really put a strain on the relationships yeah i was just gonna we were having this conversation me and you before but um you know i'm always conscious about how the rest of the world sees the mormon church and i i i was it was interesting for me to learn that in in spanish at least in mexican spanish there isn't a word for cult so i was wondering how your parents viewed mormonism your your mom your dad's family how they viewed mormonism but just even this idea of a cult it sounds like there isn't even the word for that or even maybe the idea of that which is weird because because high-demand religions often prey on developing countries yeah but this this idea wouldn't have even occurred to your family well yeah yeah like yeah other religions will call us as a sect sector but for mormons it's not triggering at all because the word sect is on the scriptures yeah um so just means a denomination right right exactly but yeah for for other other religions yeah like the word secta can mean something more like like like a cult maybe but it's not triggering for mormons um like it like the word cult is here in the us is there any kind of like tv movies or videos or any the way that like american media kind of portrays mormons is there any like negative stereotypes that are common in mexico well most a lot of people believe that mormons are polygamous um because they were polygamists exactly yeah so that's the first thing someone that doesn't know anything about mormonism is going to think that you have seven wives if you're a mormon um are there current polygamist sects in mexico right now as well yeah so a big branch of the people that went moved to mexico to lip polygamy they stopped polygamy when the manifesto i think second manifesto came but some of them the split and stayed in mexico living polygamy the main state where that all happened is chihuahua okay yeah yeah um yeah so anyway so so they got married moved to merida and uh and i was born just soon after that what year 2019 1995. okay yeah um yeah and i was born in this very hey gerardo can i check in with you on one quick thing before we do your story yeah i am always struck with the tension between how beautiful the mormon church experience can be worldwide and then when i think about in latin america like i got to see you know there's poverty everywhere including the united states but when you see poverty in a place like latin america it's a next level of poverty relative to what a kid growing up even lower crop lower class suburbia in the united states which i was it's still a next level of poverty you know when i talk about like cutting fruit in the markets i understand a little bit more about what that means and it's something that someone who is raised lower class in the us just wouldn't have a sense for what type of poverty we're talking about because even the lowest classes in the united states other than like homeless people are probably living up with with a lot more means and resources than than somebody's growing up in poverty in latin america and then i've also seen kind of the bar the bar culture in latin america the homelessness culture and just poverty in general and how sometimes in in towns or whatever you can have just men who like they go to work on the farm they come home and they drink and you know women are raising kids on their own and there's just there's a lot like in any culture there's a lot that can go wrong so when you think about you know we're talking the 80s and 90s here and yes mormonism comes in as kind of a colonizing force but at the same time they're providing this family they could go lots of different ways or this this young 20-something man or this young woman things can go a lot of different ways all of a sudden it's like be moral don't drink don't smoke be good be kind serve others go on a mission learn how to communicate and then get married quick and have kids quick and now you're going to be building becoming a model mormon family in mexico on the one hand i'm seeing like that can be a super positive influence to get take the religion out of it it's just like bringing structure bringing family values bringing morality and meaning and purpose and even helping them become more raised to us higher educational or socioeconomic status just because of that structure so on the one hand so many good things i would guess would be associated probably in your minds but definitely in your parents minds with the influence of the mormon church on their young adult lives yeah i agree is that fair i agree 100 the church um changed my mom's family's life and changed my dad's life for the better like might and here here's the thing too um my my parents checked a lot of the boxes that about like oh you had um my mom you had a dad that was alcoholic you have a single mom just this where this life experiences that make that mormonism comes and feel those holes or or or improves the life of someone that has lived those experiences yeah if you compare your dad to his siblings to his siblings yeah the church seems to have had a very positive impact yeah for a very very long time that's what it it looked like yeah i think that has been a huge part of my dad's testimony the fact that look at my siblings and like look at where i ended up um that's real yeah by your fruits you shall know them did you grow up with that phrase in your house ever about like look at our positive fruits of being this mormon family you can compare it to what we came from and yep then it's de facto true and and part of the reason i bring that up is to ground us you know there's this luna lindsey corbin has taught us that one of the signs of a height of an unhealthy organization is black and white thinking right and it's really easy for post-mormons to fall into this black and white thinking where once they're mad at the church it's just everything the church does is bad and though all the world would be better if not just mormonism but all organized religion disappeared and i i only bring this up not as a defense but just as to helping us kind of stay grounded and fair and non-binary that like i saw firsthand the church have a very positive influence on many of the families that we taught and the the church does a lot of good in the develop developing world and i would even argue the developed world and i was just checking in with you to see if you would actually confirm that yeah yeah i'm sure your parents would yeah um where i where i see a big difference i think is in the in how much the church supports um poor people in mexico um you would you would hear here is it's pretty common to hear someone that has lost their job here in the us to have their mortgage paid by the church for several months or just the church helping so they can keep their lifestyle as they're currently living if they are going through like a hard um economic problem that does not happen in mexico in mexico the church wants to give this impression i mean even though we have these beautiful temples and these beautiful chapels i feel like in some way the church wants to give this impression that the church is not wealthy um they really stress to bishops that they shouldn't be giving out they shouldn't be giving just everyone food or just providing for their needs they need to help members and and people that need it to make sure that they actually need it and that they're doing everything they can to support themselves so that makes bishops to really restrain the amount of money or the amount of resources that they're willing to give to people or members that are struggling that's where i see a a big a huge difference between the us and and mexico but yeah the church does really help on many other aspects of of people's lives and um as soon as you fit the mold uh as soon as you are not gay or like have a family member that's gay or um yeah there's a lot of good you're saying right yeah um because there's also the community and people really support each other yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so let's go on you're born gerardo was born yeah 1995 right yeah i grew up in a very very orthodox mormon home um like i told you before like my parents never drank coke like coke was a no-no in our house because my parents they were taught on their missions by their mission president that they shouldn't drink coke we wouldn't watch tv on sundays at all um sundays were just was just going to church and going home and just being home all day not even like going to the park or do something recreational with the family like that's no no it's just being home and reading the scriptures or watching uh church movies or listening to church music um even general conference for for most of my childhood and and youth um even though we were allowed to have general conferences at some point for example to watch it at home through internet or my dad one year bought an anthena to to be able to watch it at home it was just one year he decided that no it was better to go to the church building and dress up on our sundays on a sunday close and go watch your own conference and sit through the whole whatever hours general conferences and we wouldn't miss one single session uh ten hours yep how many kids are in your family uh so just two so my sister was born when i was five years old um and so is it a thing for for mexican mormon families to have super big families or was that not as much of a thing in mexico to have like four kids or six kids or eight kids for some but not as much as here in utah yeah i don't know why my parents decided just to have two two children i think a lot of it had to do with they were having i mean they only met each other a couple times before they got married uh they really struggled throughout their marriage just their their compatibility and also another thing that i i forgot to mention about how the church may not be as good and sometimes in in latin america at least mexico has a very strong misogynistic culture like machismo is huge and when that's combined with the priesthood jerky yeah yeah that's just like a bomb and is it yeah and i i saw it with with my my parents that that's some examples of of what that might look like if you and again i your parents might watch i've actually met your mom and she's lovely this isn't a bag or criticize anyone it's just culturally to describe people's experiences so it's not your dad's fault not your mom's fault we're all victims of the patriarchy or we're all influenced by patriarchy and our cultures and without the spirit of of criticizing your dad yeah i'd love to hear what the trucker plus machismo looks like one thing like my mom loves working she loves working and being active and having stuff to do honestly she's never said this but honestly i just don't think she loved being a mom um i mean she loved us she was a she was awesome to both me and my sister but i don't think she loved being a mom she she loved working and that was a big struggle for my dad that she liked working and that was like she's not the only one like i've had in retreats i've held there are lots of women that feel super guilty they love their kids right but they're a better mom by working and not being a stay-at-home mom they're a better mom that way so it's not to say a woman who doesn't love being a stay-at-home mom doesn't love her kids or even love being a mom it's just she might not be built to be a stay-at-home mom right does that make sense is that what you're saying yeah um and yeah so that was a really real struggle with my mom at a certain point times she would want to work and my dad would give her a really hard time on that um and i don't know just just things like my dad was in leadership he didn't like that yeah and my dad was in literature for a very long time so i can't give you right now specific examples but there's always this like look i'm the i'm in the state presidency you are the wife of the state you know like and kind of like your responsibilities are to keep the house uh even though my parents were very well did very well economically like we had uh people helping to clean the house and we would pay them uh for most of my childhood and youth um it was still my mom's responsibility to make sure that everything was working that every that the house keeping assignments or jobs were being done you know to just those kind of things um but yeah anyway so um and it sounds like from the very beginning of maybe their courtship you said that they got married so fast and like from their very first interaction she probably knew him as uh like the ap of the mission and two bad sisters can't have those types of positions in the mission or else maybe he would have been like oh i gotta marry this chick because she was the one who was uh the hot stuff on the mission and i think that just sets up like this uneven power dynamic from maybe the very beginning yeah it's just a typical mormon family though when we go on sundays we we we pretend everything is great we give talks and talk like our family's doing great but then behind the scenes there's a lot of fighting my parents fought a lot um a lot and yeah um but you have to keep up appearances did you feel that pressure since you were yeah yeah i always saw that that we were definitely trying to portray something different at church but at some in some ways i liked it i liked people at church seeing us as like the perfect orthodox mormon family and being part of that was something i like people my dad was in the bishopric for a long time stake presidency for a long time so just getting getting that attention from people was uh was nice yeah you don't sit in the in the chapel to watch general conference in a suit and tie because it's a spiritual experience right it's probably to be sometimes but yeah for um yeah and um i was just gonna say that it sound you know we always have this idea of a utah mormon and that can mean two different things sometimes in mormonism a utah mormon means a mormon that doesn't take their mormon mormonism seriously and because it's the host culture here people goof off and whatever but there's all this also this idea of like utah mormons being like the most orthodox the bruce r mcconkey joseph fielding smith types of mormons and it sounds like that's that's my parents that's that was you guys which is kind of interesting you guys were probably more orthodox and conservative than a huge percentage of the utah mormons yeah because you were really living it and i've seen that outside of utah too yeah um did you guys do the family meeting scripture study all that stuff sometimes like uh like for periods of time like for example general conference zone gave a talk about how important it is and then like for a few months after general conference we would be doing it and then stop um but yeah my dad would really really especially when i went into my adolescence my dad would try to have family home evening every week um i think just to make sure i i wouldn't um go off the rails or something did you have like a developing testimony throughout your childhood like okay actually yeah so that's where i was going so here here's where it gets interesting uh so i grew up hearing this story where we didn't have the only temple was in mexico was the mexico city temple so my parents when they would have to go go to the temple they would have to go there and so we would travel and um this one time so how it would work is my mom would go and do a session and then my dad would stay outside with me and then they would my mom would stay outside and then my dad would go in and do a session and my mom i think was inside the temple during a session and my dad was with me right outside the temple i ca i don't remember this but they would they told the story a lot of times uh my dad was holding me and right outside the temple you could see through the doors because there are glass doors and you could see the lobby of the temple and he says that i pointed out something inside and i said hey dad who are those angels that are right there in the in inside the temple and my dad looked and there was no one no one in in in the lobby and i said yeah right right there don't you see them and my dad didn't see anyone so i grew up hearing the story of me you don't remember this no i don't remember this but um that at some point i saw angels in the mexico city temple that meant a lot to them yeah but it clearly yeah you know here's a here's an interesting thing so i got baptized at eight obviously um kind of i already knew by that point i had already started developing um attractions to towards men i from a very very young age i was attracted to men and i knew that there was something wrong with that um i think by my baptism separate from mormonism in in mexican culture right yeah yeah um and by my baptisms i think from what i remember i was expecting the the baptisms to claim me from from those attractions in some probably abstract way that's what i was thinking wow that's young yeah super young and after the baptism i told my dad that i had had this experience of hearing a voice the spirit or whatever telling me very distinctively you are doing the right thing but i know i remember telling this to my dad but i made up that story i i know i i i know i made it up um and i made it up because i wanted my dad to feel proud of me that i had a spiritual experience on my baptism isn't that interesting i an eight-year-old made up a story about having a spiritual experience yeah to because you knew it meant so much to your parents yeah what kid doesn't want to please their parents and i heard my dad telling that story a few times after that uh wow yeah so yeah learning to i don't want to say it sinisterly but learning to lie yeah from a very young age yeah depending on your parents right right and having to hide the fact that i was attracted to men too to to guys yeah you never have to learn to lie so i had to give a face on my parents oh but and put this mask kind of like the super believing person and and a spiritual person but no kind of like i felt like i was trying to compensate maybe because of my attractions towards men maybe i don't know so this would have happened like starting maybe six seven years old before if it's before your baptism so do you have like specifically yeah probably like seven mm-hmm yeah like yeah oh i'm gonna be in trouble if i you know continue i don't know if this was before my baptism but at some point i asked my mom um i can't remember exactly what i asked but i asked is it bad when two men are together or marry each other or something like that and she explained oh yeah that's really bad um that's a really bad thing and she kind of like explained that god made man and woman and blah blah blah yeah i remember being in the back of the car and my mom was driving when this happened um anyway so by by age 12 i was for sure attracted to men and so one of the things is before adolescence um i was also attracted to women um so to girls and and i would talk to my parents about that very into enthusiastic if there was a girl at in school that i was attracted to i would talk to them about it um maybe just trying to compensate for the fact that um i don't know i like boys and something also interesting well it's not interesting i think a lot of gays have this where um you like a lot of girly things so i like well i like my uh sister toys but not not the toys that my parents bought me like cars and that kind of stuff i was interested in makeup and my mom would do her makeup i was i was interested in skirts and high heels um those kind of stuff and my parents did notice that there was kind of like maybe something off so they would try to make me go do sports like put me on soccer teams and stuff and i wouldn't last because i hated it you did yeah yeah um and so but at some point the attractions towards women just just diminished or disappeared mostly and my attractions towards men just ramped up um so when when i was a youth i i was attracted to men a lot and um and this was when i was received the aaronic priesthood at priesthood and was made a deacon and then soon after that the dickens president um and they i had a really hard time on my youth in the church because uh being the dickens or the teacher's president i had the responsibility of the less active guys of making the activities for the rest of the guys on the quorum for mutuals on thursdays and they obviously would want to play sports or do like manly things and i was not into that and i could not relate with this guys with this people so i had a really hard time feeling guilty and receiving a lot of crap from my bishop about me not doing enough to fulfill my responsibility as the deacons or teachers president and i'm feeling bad about because i just couldn't identify with this straight man were people catching on at all were you teased whatsoever like people could tell there's something yeah i was teased and and bullied probably a lot in um fifth sixth grade seventh grade um out of the church or in the church both both yeah like in the us there's he's so gay or he's a [ __ ] they're there were i won't say some of the words but they're slurs yeah comparable slurs yeah in spanish yes yeah yeah so so yeah i would be bullied in school um up until i i started high school like uh it stopped by junior high uh like a lot of the strongest bowling but yeah at church i would say it was not so much i did i do remember a couple experiences where i was bullied by guys at church but mostly was it was cool and i was the only member in my school um too because my my parents did well economically i went to private schools bilingual schools where i learned english um so uh that's a luxury yeah uh so most of the friends that i made um during during during that during that time um well they were they're not mormons um before high school i knew i was attracted to guys but i hadn't accepted to myself that i was gay is this a weird thing yeah we're like you know you're attracted to guys and maybe had some contact with porn and masturbation but you still don't accept yourself as gay or wouldn't say i'm gay but in high school two of my friends or girls they asked me um at one point they asked me hey are you gay and i first i told them no and then and then thought about it a little bit more and decided maybe i should just tell someone so i told them i'm yeah i'm gay around what age um probably 15. yeah they were the first she came out to yeah that's a big deal i'm glad you were able to come out that yeah yeah and they yeah so they and and soon after i just told the rest of my friends in high school i really made really good relationship the bullying had like stopped by that point there were a couple gay guys on in in that high school um so it was it was not a common thing but it was just like a little more accepting thing i i think well my friends were like oh that's so cool that you're gay and blah blah you know and my my friends i had guy friends too who accepted it and heterosexual friends and they're fine with it so this is blowing my mind a tiny bit because i'm thinking about my high school experience and there was not one you know i grew up in the late 80s mid mid to late 80s in high school not one out open lgbt person in the whole school and then at some point magic johnson the age stuff happens and and there starts to become more awareness of this and then you get the ellen time period where this is very us-centric but like ellen at some point comes out as gay and that's a big thing and she like loses her job but then she comes back and but but it hasn't been until kind of i don't know the mid 2000s and then prop 8 where it starts to become more discussed more popular etc so i'm just trying to imagine you're coming out as openly gay in a mexican private high school as a mormon around what year um to like 2 000 2010. okay okay that's nine yeah ellen would have been okay so that makes a little more sense so i'm wondering about whether there was any safety risk for you or social risk it sounds like that was not a big deal but then i'm also wondering how you kept that from your family yeah but you had no mormons so that's one way yep no mormons in your high school yep yep but i did have one friend that was that was a member of the church my best friend and i did tell him and he was the son of another stake president oh yeah and but he didn't it wasn't a scandal no like he he was he was he's heterosexual and but he he was like mom whatever it's fine that's cool it's like john was talking about how like ellen and kyle ashworth's uh interview the other day he was kind of talking about how there's you know different celebrities that spur a lot of coming out or more like normalizing you know different ideas around gender and sexuality was there anyone that you looked up to in any time period in your youth that you remember feeling more comfortable with your sexuality to be able to do that yeah okay yeah so growing up there was this family in in in our ward uh who were neighbors they lived right down the street um who had a son who went to who went on his mission came back to new york came back and went to byu and even though he was not out at that point everyone in the ward and people on the stake would talk about him being gay and even though he was going to byu he was just out and well and doing stuff with guys and just um just not being very active at a church um so there was this big rumor as he became kind of like my like this person that i looked up to like oh it can be done you know like uh you can be um more you can be gay and like and and be happy and be fine and and have fun um so that was probably it wasn't talked about as in a super negative way like he's a horrible bad terrible person oh in the church yes i didn't see him that way because i i was like i have those attractions i don't i don't think he's this horrible person so so even though others were talking especially my religion religious context you didn't internalize that negativity for you you were looking up to the guy yeah that's really yeah that is understood yeah yeah because at that point but by that point i was not in high school i was not really interested in the church i mean i was still doing everything i was going to it looked like you were i was going to seminary at 5 00 5 45 a.m every day i was going to church and president yeah it helped a lot that i had i was a really good student and i helped my parents a lot with the family business um so so they just saw me as a good healthy uh son so they were not worried about me and that that allowed me to have this kind of like two lives where i could present myself as the orthodox mormons to my parents and church and then at the same time being openly gay um to to my friends and on the weekends when i went out with my with my friends did you have any kind of plan for the future that like at some point i'm gonna have to leave the church over this or at some point i'm gonna have to like get married to a woman or like did you have any exit plan of what you thought you were going to do yeah my exit plan was exactly what that friend had had done i was going to go to byu and then just be gay openly gay while still staying yes yeah and i had talked to him a few times and he had told me a little bit about how he was to be gay at byu whoa how old are you at this point okay this was probably just like and i don't want to get ahead of the timeline right like uh 16 okay 16. a little bit later uh bro actually probably 15 16. yeah and was he saying that he was dating men on like on the dl while attending i can't remember exactly how how it was but say you were 15 or 16. yeah i was okay i just have to say this is a gay mormon kid orthodox gay mormon kid in mexico in high school finding out about another gay mormon kid and talking to that kid about being gay in an open way i bet that doesn't happen here in the us very often so this is you know i can't imagine some kid in draper who's gay finding out about a kid three years old or who's gay and draper and then them talking about what it's like to be at byu this seems like kind of a remarkable story well homosexuality was not talked about in the church at all in mexico in mexico oh interesting it was talked about maybe that he was not very active and that he may be doing stuff that is not right but the topic was not talked at all so for me knowing that i was gay was like i don't have any other option i can't stay in the church i can't marry a woman i'm not attracted to them i didn't know about conversion therapy i didn't know that there was thing a thing called mixed orientation marriages so for me the path was traced it was like i'm gay i have to be out i didn't know anybody else who was gay and had stayed in the church so um so he was the only person i kind of like um could see as an example and and he also was studying graphic design and love photography which picked my interest and loved it so it's like that's what i'm gonna go do i'm gonna go to byu and study graphic design and um get away from my parents so i can be openly gay and i just have to check in on this the the whole shame hamster wheel porn masturbation thing that most mormon youth was that a thing it was a thing 100 100 yes you want to talk about that at all yeah it's hard it is it's hard i think maybe it was early on before i completely had come out when a lot of the shame was because i had already what i mean pornography was not super available at that point um but i did have some access to it and master had a few masturbation experiences um so yeah there was a lot especially when i went because i had done it already when i became a deacon um before you would have even learned about it maybe yeah i think the first times that i did it i didn't know it was like a bad thing i didn't know what masturbation was uh and i did it and i learned it after i don't know remember when i learned that associated the two and two together um but anyway but i do remember here is another thing i do remember when i i knew already it was bad wrong that i was doing that and you became the deacon and that's when you can go into the temple to do baptisms for the death and my dad of course was gonna be there um he was gonna be baptizing that day and i he um so i went through the interview and i denied i said no i haven't done anything i didn't want to confess but i did feel super guilty that i'm lying um so i went to the temple and i felt super bad like oh my gosh what's gonna happen i'm unworthy and super worried too under interview like is the bishop gonna know is he gonna read it in my eye is he gonna see it in my eyes that i have done something wrong um because there's this idea that um and my dad loves this phrase of the temple when the god will not be mocked he that's a a phrase that like would um he would tell me a lot you know god would not be mocked so i went to the temple really worried that what's going to happen because i'm not worthy to be here but i had the most amazing spiritual experience i had in my whole life so at that point i was like maybe i don't have to confess maybe i'm just clean if i ask god to forgive me and i'm i'm fine um it's good yeah and so i love it i love just as society i love as i'm observing this story that you so far it doesn't seem like you were wracked super racked with the guilt and shame even though you knew this wasn't the way i love it that somehow it seems like you're escaping a lot of this tragic awful guilt and shame well it's an honor it was like it was like a switch and on and off like i could turn turn off the shame and then there would be a general conference talk where boy k packer would talk about masturbation or pornography and then i would feel horrible i would hate going gays right he would sometimes yeah or gay yeah i would hate going to like going to priesthood the pre-school session because i knew that's when they were going to talk about those topics and i would just feel horrible or somewhat or a 70 would come and talk on our stake or award and would talk about if you are not worthy and you're not confessing blah blah blah i would feel horrible for several days after that and then i don't know i would just be able to just forget about it turn it off and just keep going with my life i think but part of the reason that you didn't confess that you were afraid that the bishop would i mean then they tell your parents sometimes especially if it's at all tied they ask you some questions about what kind of porn did you watch and you would have maybe had to were you afraid that your parents were gonna also no well kind of catch on well that they're gonna know like i i was afraid that that the bishop was gonna not that my parents were gonna right yeah um i just have to say i love that you were finding a way to successfully compartmentalize yeah because it sounds like it wasn't an overall tormenting experience it sounds like you had moments of fear or sadness or shame yeah but that your your your resting state was one of just like acceptance and maybe even comfort yeah i think it became like that okay later in high school yeah early on 12 13 14 a lot of shame okay um let's give a round of applause to the lgbtq community who paved the way so that a kid in 201 2010 in mexico um was able to probably not have as much of a burden of shame but it's probably already heaped upon earlier generations that's really interesting there was this um my dad was on the stick presidency for a long time at some point i went and looked at handbook one of general instructions for for bishops and sake presidents so i grabbed the manual and i went and looked specifically on the issue of repentance and there are there is this section still to this day and by at that time at that time you were not supposed to look at that manual unless you were a bishop or a state president but still did it and when i looked and there's this section that talks about repentance and when a member comes to repent and confess of something that he did years bef a lot of years before um he may not need a disciplinary council or may not need to go through uh you know the six months of not taking the sacrament blah blah he may if he stop doing it he may be forgiven so i was like then why do i have to tell the bishop if if like i just stopped doing it at some point i'm gonna be forgiven what's the whole thing about like telling the bishop so i i didn't feel like i had to and so in some ways i would justify it um but yeah that's your brain keeping you safe telling you i know that you're gonna feel some guilt here let me give you some happy chemicals just to make all that shame and guilt goes away it's just being strategic and smart and resourceful yeah to kind of survive and thrive i love it right yeah i think so and it's also learning to be kellen sneaky and you know a little bit deceptive or or justifying yeah it's all that and he doesn't who doesn't do that on some level in the mormon experience yeah that's what i was gonna say it all goes back to like that perfect mormon family and things like that and i'm just wondering how much i can't wait to find out when your parents and everything kind of come out to them when their perfect mormon family was kind of coming out it's not what they i know enough to know that coming out isn't the way i describe it is all right let's get to it so let me talk about um so when i turned 8 14 the church came up with this program which probably you guys heard of efy um and they brought it to mexico i think here in the us it is owned by byu originally it was owned by byu and here youth that want to go not everyone gets to go and you have to pay a lot of money to go but what they did is i think the the church bought the program to translate it into spanish and took it to mexico and i think the pilot program happened in my my my my region really yeah the first time it ever happened in mexico and i was the exact age that you were able to go i think it was 14. so the church invested a lot a lot a lot of money into mexican efy and that was so i would have this great spiritual experiences in church as well so it was kind of like a conflicting conflicting thing for me because it went to be efy and you know it's like this super um there's a lot of um they kind of went through steven hasson's book of [Laughter] underwear influence and mind control and we're like okay well let's create a program for youth that includes all these aspects that is like a mini mtc so give us these examples music obviously yeah music you're not allowed to talk to your parents uh you're separated from them so they so in in mexico they rented this whole resort to have all the stakes around to go to this resort and and to the efy so you are away from your parents um you have very strict uh behavioral behavioral things like you can't do this you can't do that you if there's the swimming pool you can't if anyone goes into the swimming pool we're gonna send them back home um you there's very strict schedule smoking yeah yeah schedule super strict schedule like at this time we're waking up but this time we're going to bed at this time uh we're doing this next thing and it's all day of like just spiritual things of uh hearing talks and and conferences and and mixed with like fun stuff as well but everything has like a spiritual aspect to it uh the there's probably grooming standards and dress codes oh yes yes so they would have so as soon as you i remember i had my hair a little long because that's how i always liked it i want to see gerardo's long hair by the way and my dad told me like they're gonna cut your hair if if you don't there and i was like they're not gonna cut my hair so as soon as you get off the bus they have this like uh ysa going and looking who has long hair and they would put you aside and then cut your hair uh just like jesus needed to have his hair short to be able to minister yeah uh yep not short shorts even for with for men just i don't know and the peak event of it is this super spiritual conference where there's music and this um show videos and images about jesus and yeah and this is what he did for you and like and he died for you and um that's probably when i realized okay probably the church is it's true that for the first i mean i had the temple experience uh before but it was a reminder like the church has to be true like this is incredible it feels so great yeah yeah yeah and then right after that like huge conference and they make you split into groups and then it's a testimony meeting where like um everyone stands up and share their testimony while you're bawling and talking about your experiences and yeah um anyway so i just have to say in my mormon experience growing up in katy houston texas youth conferences temple trips just the mormon youth experiences and particularly the testimony meetings where everyone's crying and singing and sharing things that that was the pillar of my testimony because i never got witness reading the book of mormon right same ever and and it's it's really important because number one that's that's you know if mormonism's strong it's because they know how to generate what's called elevation emotion in those teenage years combine it with family pressure social pressure get the kids to feel those super powerful emotions and then always get them to associate that you have these amazing feelings we've helped generate these amazing feelings in you and let's let's interpret that for you to mean that that means the church is true therefore you have a testimony and that's that's what seals a mormon kid into mormonism sometimes for the rest of their lives oh yes yes and that was they made it free it's not like here i think it's a few cfy is free it's free yeah here's a couple thousand dollars i think yeah yeah they made it a hundred the first time it was a hundred percent free later they made it so like you have to pay up a couple like fifteen fifteen dollars to go um nothing right and then even if you were not able to pay it the bishop will come in and pay it for you so they really wanted all youth to go especially the less active youth to go to this program is that the name of it especially last less active youth just kidding what was it called yeah what is it called spanish uh menos activos no no the efy efy they couldn't make it i just looked up the translation because i'm a nerd they changed the name later to fsy you know and what does that mean uh here is like for the strength of you okay okay um but they didn't have like at some point they did try to translate the name i think they did translate it but then they kept the oh and then you have this like thing that where you go e f why this this what do you what would you like this cheers yeah yeah chance and yeah so those would still be in english uh like repulsed it like the colonization memes were going up here just all these mexican kids shouting this white man's bible fan fiction i don't know uh yeah um anyway and it was a really um amazing and unique experience because growing up as a youth the leadership at least in my word i know in a lot of words it was the same it seemed like they would make the less active brother to be the young men's president to try to get him active again so the activities would suck um there was not a lot of good leadership for the youth for me growing up um so efy was just like this like wow this thing that i had never seen before i just have to say that like losing the youth represents an existential threat to mormonism into any religion and so it's just so if you want to understand how mormonism survives and thrives look at what they're doing with the youth and this is borne out by the way even the management of the wards has evolved to where in within the past few years the church got rid of a young men's president the position of young men's president has been eliminated because now the bishop is to be the young the equivalent of the young men's president and any bishop will tell you their number one goal is is to keep the youth because if you lose the youth you lose it all you got to get the youth you got to get the youth with testimonies so that they can then go on missions which seals them to the church and then immediately got to get them off their mission married quickly and then having kids quickly and that is going to guarantee or maximize the probability that you're going to keep your your members and this is what happened with your parents by the way and it's what they were it's what they were doing with you and it's what they do here with the fy and youth programs at its core mormonism is oriented towards getting and keeping their youth yeah true yeah i think the church started getting worried that they were losing a lot of youth in in latin america as well that's why they started doing this um because at the same time my dad was released from the stake presidency and he and my mom were called to with this to this pilot um calling regional calling to i can't remember even the name of the calling but they were going to be pretty much the uh the couple in charge of the ysa in the region so quintana roo yucatan and campeche the three states my parents were going to be touring uh through towards to different state conferences and giving talks and talking just about um their experience getting married making ysa to go on their missions to and and really pushing them to get married and and they were going to start doing this type of efy conferences for ysa uh where they would make this invest a lot of money in this uh retreats for ysa so they could marry um because it's hard to find a partner when you're a mormon in mexico because there's not a lot of options right and so they did this for a few years they organized these huge conferences for ysa of three different states and uh and um mexican states yeah yeah mexican states yeah yep that's just divided into how many states thirty thirty one i think so thirty one yeah and total population of the country i'm not sure yeah i'm not i'm not a boss carrick can look that up um just so we can get a sense for right i know my c just my cd alone there's uh 2 million 130 million 130 million so it's like a third maybe a third of the united states ish probably okay yeah um so yeah and there i i got to go to a couple of their huge conferences that they organized one of them was in cancun with like they i think they rented the hotels and then they had like these huge retreats on like nice um outdoors play places and beaches and yeah that's up next kids get to do youth conferences in efy at beaches that's not fair that's not fair yeah um and they they were really successful they got a lot of ysa uh to get married from those conferences yeah yeah smart very smart yep very smart yep and uh yeah so they would not be at home for a long for a couple years they would not be at home a lot of the weekends because they would be traveling to other states and to speak in state conferences um to the to the young single adults um and that's the time that's when i was in high school and that gave me a little more freedom to to like go out more with my friends and um also i started experimenting going around going out on dates with guys and i did stuff like kissed and made out with guys um right big deal yeah big big deal in high school um and tried alcohol and yeah all this without my parents knowing while you're on these efi things no no so i'm saying my parents would would be traveling a lot to because of their calling okay so that allowed me to like have a little more freedom on like my going out experiences with friends and in high school yeah yeah so you started drinking yep and dating boys and that's and i we talked about whether we should even mention this most gay mormon men i've interviewed their first romantic experience at all is with a woman after their mission and it's usually what the woman they end up marrying and they don't experiment with any same-sex romantic stuff prior to getting married to a woman at all yeah and so it's interesting the i like the idea that we finally get to interview a gay man a gay mormon man who in his youth was able to at least date a little bit or make out or do normal teen stuff what was that like yeah it was great i loved it did you feel like a super hypocrite i did and i felt i there was a lot of shame like going on sundays are these kids from high school or how are you meeting these kids yeah get gay mexican you can remember maybe i can't remember no no there were no there were no apps we won't check your search history just tell us what's going on i don't know how i think parties okay okay uh maybe i mean you were out yeah yeah um is there like a a culture of like in in america the way that you can almost tell if somebody's gay by the way they dress and the flamboyance is is that a way that you dressed or the way that you presented yourself that you could same thing yep okay so yeah so it was really easy to pick who's gay on the part in the party i mean there wouldn't be many probably a couple but um yeah so you're you're believing in mormonism you know it's true your dad's been in stake leadership callings your mom and dad are totally in it to win it you're viewed as like a model mexican mormon family yep and you're making out with boys in high school and drinking anything yeah yeah you're saying you were tormented yeah a little bit a little bit like when efy would happen can you imagine how would that make me feel like oh crap but at the same time i would be like but this is not gonna work for me i'm gay i mormonism is not gonna work you knew in the long run yeah it wouldn't work because i didn't know there was something like mixed orientation marriages i didn't know there was a way to maybe make it work for a while right um and until it doesn't right because no one's talking about it and i'm not going to tell my parents that i'm gay can you imagine uh so okay and what was that this is going to sound weird and i don't even know how to ask this question what was it like making out with other boys like it was it like exciting if i'm sure oh it was amazing i loved it yeah yeah it was yeah you didn't feel you you were able to enjoy that yes yes i'm so happy you were able to enjoy that yes and i would tell my friends about it and like they were happy for me and yeah it was great it was it was great i love simon is that the movie last time it reminds me a little bit of that yeah i loved high school high school was great for me um it was fun it was really really really fun um but at the same time i was the best seminary student like my seminary teacher loved me and i was the one knowing all the scripture mastery and winning the competitions and your lips were the one who knew the most about the doctrine because my dad was an avid reader he had all doctrines of salvation all these like mormon general authorities books and he knew a lot about doctrine i remember this one time when i was junior high we were talking about evolution just so you can um just picture how how much my dad's ideas are even though he's very smart how much mormon ideas are rooted in him i evolution was a topic so i went to my dad and i asked him hey what about this what about evolution like how do we explain this um and he goes and shows me a scripture i think it was on the bible where he talks about people oh because i was like how do we explain the skeletons um that look like between monkeys and human like what is that about transitional fossils uh one of the explanations that i hear later was the one that everyone knows that is that um god put elements from other earths into this one right but the answer i remember he gave me was shown she showed me the scripture in the bible where he talks about humans having sex with animals yeah so in my in my on my mind it was oh these skeletons are the offspring of humans having babies with with monkeys that's how we explain it and that's what that's why i understood from what my dad told me but anyway so i i have to jump in and just say that when you talk about your dad kind of reading doctrines of salvation and josephine smith stuff it brings something really powerful back to me because uh when i was you know i didn't i had my seminar experience growing up but i didn't know i didn't fully understand joseph fielding smith and doctrines and mormon doctrine bruce r mcconkey kind of stuff until my mission because what happened was i went to the distribution center in guatemala and they saw all three volumes of doctrines of salvation and i wanted to learn spanish so i read those three books in spanish and that served two purposes it helped me learn vocabulary but i also learned a super rigid form of mormonism that i'd gotten a taste of in seminary but joseph fielding smith takes it to a new level and by the way there's nothing really radical that nothing really original that bruce r mcconkey taught no he basically just repackaged stuff from his father-in-law joseph fielding smith so these are books that are like tornadoes and hurricanes are formed in earthquakes or from sin and never use the lord's name in vain or like awful things will happen to you and the gays are bad evolution is evolution is of the devil all that seven deadly heresies kind of thing that all came out of doctrines of salvation and that radicalized me for a while so i'm sure it made your dad a super intense woman well for me that was mormonism growing up that that was there was no other types of emotions right signs of the time yes like why would it be another kind of mormonism than the one that a former prophet is talking about yeah yeah yeah yeah um and joseph smith was talking about a lot of this stuff too yeah um and and the compilation of teachings of the prophet joseph smith done by joseph filling smith also is a lot of this like super um crazy stuff about worlds and and we're going to get something yeah my dad really believes in all that stuff like gardeveedon's in missouri oh 100 that's where he adam lived the earth is six thousand years old only six thousand yeah yeah literal flood yeah like all that stuff it is so influential and it kind of explains why you also had a big faith crisis and now you're into apologetics and because like that's our that's our mormonism yeah highly influential stuff joseph fielding smith doctrines of salvation you know powerful stuff yeah or the court the curse of cain yeah right black black even when i came back from my mission the the i mean i'll talk about this but i'm i'll say it because i'm i'm gonna forget when i came back from my mission i had read already the the gospel topic essay about blacks and the priesthood and the sentence where it says kind of like we no longer support the theories advance in the past that uh anyone was less valiant or whatever tied to skin color yeah and one yeah and the first one of the first conversations i had with my dad when i came back from my mission was about blacks in the priesthood and he said well yes because they were less valiant and i told him like no the church has already disavowed that yeah it's like he didn't really believe me but you're basically saying you had read that stuff as a teenager yeah in jerusalem well not read i didn't read it but my dad would talk about it yeah my dad was 100 the church and work that's my dad um and if you had to put them in order it was the church number one work number two and the third one would be family um so he was either always at work talking about the church or at church and you're saying well you're literally saying not not to dis on your dad but family came after yeah work work in church that's what you're saying yeah 100 yeah yeah and that's just i thought that was a lot of a lot of conflict between my mom and dad or what was about that that the fact that he was he would just spend too much time at church and my dad would be like but this is what i have to do like this is what the lord wants me to do what are you like you're being and he would get mad at her like you're being less um less faithful mermaid it's it's murmuring it's like sarah in the book can i just ask it makes me kind of wonder since your dad is a convert and we're talking about a different culture in mexico that he would have been raised in i'm just kind of curious in your perspective how much of that kind of like patriarchal opinions and the way that he viewed family and ran your household how much of that do you think was his feeling like the authority of the priesthood in your house that happened because he converted versus with just his personality and and just outlying problems with with the machismo kind of culture that you were talking about earlier yeah spirulia makes we'll never know but it just makes me kind of wonder how much the church contributed to those types of attitudes in your household like yeah like i told john it 100 contributes because he gives men the the basis like here it is the lord's provided a mandate it's like much he's mexican machismo with divine mandate right exactly yes yeah that's so that i feel like they feel justified about it and it just yeah i don't know i i can't give you a percentage of how yeah it's just interesting and also it makes me kind of think that if you're your dad and so many other people don't know about the gospel topics essays and the different things that we probably shouldn't be teaching anymore like who knows what ideas are still being purported is from the mouthpiece from from salt lake city that are still supposedly accepted ideas that people are still teaching because the gospel topics essays are not around the world around the world they're not widely taught like i said at the beginning till today i would say i 80 to 90 percent of mormons in mexico believe that they're literal descendants of lehi no one has told them like oh the church has changed the intro yeah that's that's well and book of mormon central the church spends a lot of money on book of mormon central and well sorry the church donates a lot to more good and more good donates to book of mormon central and morgan spends a lot of money in mexico and book of mormon central spends a lot of money in mexico and they're always talking about how mexicans are the descendants of lehigh till today still still yeah yeah um anyway okay so your dad was a bruce mcconkey joseph family smith mormon and a kind of a mormon scholar in air quotes yes right doctrine doctrinal guy yeah yeah i'll say that um okay so here here's where my parents find out i i am gay [Laughter] um so we were it was a state my dad wasn't the stake presidency at this point again i i so you know how they released that release him they called them to the original calling for the ysa and then they released them from that and then he was called to the state presidency again yeah um with a different state president and so he was it was it was i think it was a ward conference and my dad was that day and he there and he was on the stand um what do you call it when they when they're presenting yeah he was presiding right so i was sitting in the second row of of the chapel it was me my sister at that point so i had already told my sister i was gay so my sister was like what um like 12 years old and i had told her she was i was gay and she she knew she knew and she kept the secret she didn't tell my parents um anyway so i was sitting then my sister was next to me and then my mom and i was i remember i had this motorola phone no motorola um blackberry blackberry it's blackberry uh phone and i was texting with a guy that i had met the night before um and and then at some point i just started paying it my dad is a great speaker charismatic yeah super charismatic like i loved when my dad would give talks like he's amazing so at some point i think i was paying attention maybe to what my dad was saying and and my sister asked for my phone and i didn't think about it i just okay here it is give it to her and then at some point i reacted and i turned and then my mom had my phone oops and she was reading and like scrolling or whatever you do with blackberries um and i just started panicking like oh my gosh she's gonna read the text that i i was just texting this guy uh so i kind of like do this to my sister and tell her hey tell mom to give me my phone back and my my sister would not look at me she was just like she wouldn't she would she just ignored me oh no and i was like what is happening did she turn you in i don't know i don't know i've never asked them how what happened or how how it happened um so can you imagine just the feeling the whole the like just the last 20 30 minutes of the of of the meeting what'd you feel yeah i just i was just dying inside i was like what am i gonna do what are my parents gonna do they're gonna kick me out of the house um i have told my friends who are not mormon two of my best friends girls um catholic i told them i told them at some point that my parents ever found out they would probably kick me out and if i could stay at their houses if i could live with them i really thought they'd kick you out yeah uh so i had kind of like already talked to them to my kind of like in case it ever happens like this may have to be something we'll have to look into um so i was just going through my through my mind to all those thoughts like maybe i'll have to move out of the house what am i going to do something important here is to my plan by that point was i am going to go on my mission because i know then my dad is gonna let me to move to go to byu if i'm done with my mission my dad can't say anything and at some point my mom has said that to me like if you're going because my dad didn't want me to go to byu um i didn't even go to the church high school because my dad was like no like people send their kids there if they because they don't want to take care of them actually uh so and my dad had seen what had happened to that neighbor too at byu so yeah byu so but i knew if i go on my mission then he'll probably say it's fine uh so my plan was going and then going byu and then be gay um uh okay so here let me think sorry um so i think it's i so you know your mom's looking at your phone and i was just curious what was going through your mind and you had said that you were terrified that they'd kick you out yeah and that you had kind of a game plan right to live with friends if they had kids yeah yeah um yeah and then also like my plans are ruined like i won't be able to go to my mission maybe or byu um how how on earth am i well maybe if i am kicked out i guess i can be gay now but how am i going to live like what's the plan the right plan right um some of the reasons that made me think like maybe i can live on my own was that by that point i was really involved with the family business so i was making pretty decent money um so i was like i can maybe do that somewhere somewhere else and anyway um just if people think like how can he think as a teenager just move out and live by himself but that that's where my thoughts going and through my mind and just it was really scared i was really scared and i so then the the meeting ended and my mom stood up super fast grabbed my phone and went towards my dad said something to him and gave him the phone and uh yeah i was devastated i was like okay this is it so i think i think i just walked home after that i just walked home because we just lived a few streets from from from the chapel um i walked home and i called my friends on the phone and i told them like my parents have found out that i'm gay so can you ask your moms if i could stay with you and i remember they they responded they said yes they said you can stay here if you need to so then my parents came back from um from church and my parents went right into their bedroom they didn't say anything to me they just went into their bedroom and i think part of it was what like my parents have never heard of this before i forgot about this to tell this too before um while i was in junior junior high the school psychologist had called my mom to talk to her about me being bullied and the school psychologist had told my mom that i was like kind of like inferred that i was gay and that that's the way i was and that there was no way to change that and my mom just got super mad and was like he's crazy like there's no way my son is gay or whatever um so she ignored it um and this was early on and anyway so they went into their room for several hours and i was just outside kind of like not knowing okay what am i supposed to do and my sister at some point went in into their bedroom um before you before me yeah and i don't know how i found out about this but my sister one of the things she told them was um i that's the way he is you can't change him and just let him be who he is that's nice yeah um so then finally they called me in to the bedroom and my mom you know she's been bawling and crying and i think my dad too and they asked me kind of like okay so um here are the options what do you want to do we can look for resources that can help you um be help you with this problem that you have and uh and then so you can maybe go on your mission and just keep being faithful or or what do you want to do they're doing i don't think they give me option b but um i mean what do you do i was okay let's look into like what resources can help me and i just have to say that two things strike me there one is that well at some level you're comfortable and happy with who you are but then you're realizing that who you are has now caused a huge problem and made your mom cry and made this huge serious jolt to the family there's they're sort of like experiencing that for the first time it's like whoa who i am is is causing trauma to my family and making my mom cry and then there's sort of like the pathologist the pathologizing of it where it's not just that but it's it's a little bit worse than that because it's like okay this is like an illness this is like a disease maybe we can cure you or fix it is there anything you want to say that that's what how it's coming across to me how it might have been for you at the time well i felt horrible that my mom was crying that they found out i was gay um and i just felt horrible and i just felt like this is the only thing like this is my only option like going going with it like and doing whatever they want me to do um and maybe at some point in the future i'll be able to figure something out but yeah and this was when i was 16. um my birthday is in january so it was like mid 16 probably and one of the one of the things they told me my dad my dad said we're not gonna tell the bishop well first he asked me you haven't done anything with a guy like that would or anything that would need uh you to confess to the bishop right oops and you probably had yes yeah well what does that mean right nowadays right we get are you supposed to confess if you kiss the guy nowadays like i don't know anyway but well in my mind i'm like of course i have but but i also but the way he was saying it was like right that's how i felt it felt to me leading the witness yeah so that you would yeah because your dad i mean what stake president what more mistake president wants it to get out that his son's gay right right right and rumors just spread fat like wildfires especially in mexico yeah um no confidentiality at all everyone knows everyone's problems if they if you want to talk to the bishop everyone probably already knows um and bishops don't know they don't know anything about this topic like they're not trained and they like that and the church doesn't really talk about it the church doesn't have a lot of resources out there what are they gonna offer that i think that was part of my dad's mind too i think we can do better here and and ourselves and your mom knows english he can con she can try to find something find resources um so i told them no i don't have anything to confess and um till this day they're breathing a huge sigh of relief it's like oh wow good till this day my parents don't know that i did all that stuff so if they listen to this they'll be the first time they and again all that stuff means healthy normative dating yeah which you would want for anyone right right but it's in a mormon context it's shameful and scandalous yep yep um so yeah um so there were those were the thing that what happened and then the next days my mom my mom and my dad just started researching online um she knows english and they found evergreen ouch yeah should we tell people what that is yeah um so evergreen is an organization that started in the late like 1900s 1990 maybe 90s yeah i think 80s actually 80s and 90s yeah it was a group of lds gay member members of the church who were wanting to make uh mixed-orientation marriages work and or being gay work in the church and based on these they founded this organization based on the idea that people can change that homosexuality can be cured and repaired and you can become if not completely heterosexual you can definitely manage your attractions towards towards the same gender and and eventually marry a partner and just like a a different sex partner and and go to the temple and just live a mormon life and just because i studied this as part of my phd i'll just add a tiny bit i love that yeah that that it it has its roots in the in the mental health profession ironically because if you go back to skinner and um and and pavlov there's kind of this idea that you know you study behaviorism and you start trying to study human behavior and there's a strain of the mental health profession that's like hey people become gay for maladaptive reasons and if you if you just take behavioral principles of association and conditioning you can ungaze someone just like you know we we made them gay by improper parenting or we made them gay by a detached father and an overbearing mother or impro or abuse or you know sexual abuse or some type of bad uh upbringing that's how we made them gay and so we can use similar psychological principles to unmake them gay to make them straight and so you have a rising in the 80s and 90s north which was the national association of reparative therapies and then you have within judaism noah i believe it's called or jonah jonah jews um you know and so the evangelical movement and the catholic movement and the jewish movement they all had their flavors of conversion therapy groups where they would have support groups for gay men or women they would have retreats for gay men and women and this was a larger movement within the conservative you know religious institutions in the united states and evergreen was just the mormon flavor of you know this broader movement and it it's weird because it was it was led by mental health professionals but but at the same time the american psychological association the american psychiatric association all the whole mental health field was moving away from being gay as being pathologized it was taken out of the dsm the diagnostic and statistic manual as a disease or as a mental illness as early as like the early 70s so as the whole mental health profession is moving away and saying this is normative stuff being lgbt is just part of kind of people's experiences in the world and it's not to be pathologized there's a strain within the mental health profession that's still trying to publish journal articles about conversion therapy and people and gain themselves and and and that sort of thing and so it's this weird schizophrenic dynamic that was occurring and so this guy named dean byrd you want to look that up i think it's byrd but he was like the mormon you know he was a medical doctor he was one of the main guys who started evergreen which is the precursor to north star and that's when you start seeing in the 80s well you see in the 70s the byu aversion shock therapy where they're literally trying to apply these behaviors principles of shocking the genitalia of gay men as they show them gay porn to using skinner and and pavlov principles to condition people away from being gay and then towards being straight and then of course that was a disaster it literally drove mormon gay men at byu crazy um and some even ended their lives and died by suicide so anyway that was the early version of this and then towards the 80s and 90s you start to see support groups and then these retreats like journeying to manhood and others and and evergreen which by the way was sponsored by the church so there would always be either a general authority an emeritus general authority on the board of evergreen regularly they have these annual conferences where either a current or former general authority would speak and i discovered in my sleuthing work in the you know in the early to mid 2000s that the church was funding evergreen so part of my passion around the morgued foundation and fair mormon and book of mormon central and the interpreter foundation was realizing that what the mormon church would do is they would shadow fund these non-profits to do kind of the dirty work that they didn't want any legal or financial or pr liability for being involved in so what they would do is they would make these informal callings to people where they were to lead these organizations these separate nonprofits and the church would funnel money to them and funnel lds family services and all these therapists to tell their members to go to these things but then the church would have plausible deniability and kind of an arm length arms length distance from them so that they wouldn't get into trouble right and so that was evergreen in the 80s and 90s and then it sounds like even into the 2000s and yes even in the 2000s conversion therapy reparative therapy mormon flavor being evergreen evergreen was alive and well even up to the point where i've started my phd in it by 2009 yeah and so you it's just interesting to hear that that hits your experience and what you're about is this 2012. so it was the last years of evergreen yeah obviously we didn't know like my mom didn't know oh evergreen was a struggling organization yeah yeah um i've heard from a really really really good source that the reason the main reason why evergreen uh disappeared was i mean there's a lot of reasons like you're saying uh the church was realizing that conversion therapy is not working then it's a legal liability right and a pr liability because people like michael ferguson and others start suing jonah the jewish version of evergreen and others and of course the the head of the evangelical version of evergreen and i'm forgetting exodus admits that he comes out as gay and admits that like 99 of the gay men who have been through exodus international were never changed right so i you know but and i you know and i'm not trying to take credit for this but me and bill bradshaw and others in the you know when prop 8 made us mad and then we're learning about evergreen and that makes us mad by 2009-2010 we're starting to release the results of our of our research around lgbtq mormons this is my dissertation and we start making noise about how jonah and exodus and evergreen are bad news so that all by by 2010 2011 2012 this is all leading up to the ted talk um the church is starting to see the writing on the wall that that evergreen is not going to be sustainable and it could be a pr risk and a legal risk right so i i only give all that history because we don't talk about it enough it's very important history that's impacted tens of thousands of mormons and their families and their straight spouses and the children that came along afterwards kyle um ashworth talked about this in my recent interview with him he's amazing but this is really important history that affected tens of thousands of lives and it's the backdrop to what the story you're about to tell yeah i hope that's on the greg brandt's on his book um the gay gay rights on the mormon church he has a whole section of evergreen he says that on the best days of evergreen they were uh in at some point they were getting at least 150 men most of them married to women contacted them for help every month so yeah it was they worked also close together at some point with family services with lds family services um and they were constantly being referred uh by bishops and stake presidents and i mean evergreen definitely had it its impact and by the point we contact we found out about evergreen they were really struggling we didn't know about this but i was saying that i i've heard that the main reason it disappeared was because the church stopped funding them and i went last night and looked at their the tax returns and they go from having a several hundred thousand dollars to having like six thousand dollars one year on on um on donations the last year they were operating in the reds the last three or four years um so they went from having hundreds of thousands of dollars to like all of the sudden there's no donations i've heard from a really good source that it was the church who was originally donating and they just stopped their donation in greg prince book he talks about how also the church stopped lending letting them use the joseph memorial because they used to have their conferences yeah on church property yep yeah and i'm just torn because on the one hand it's super smart of the church to avoid legal and pr liability by creating these no why didn't the church come out and say hey we don't agree with evergreen anymore no no i mean that's what i was about to say that like there's this long history of the church creating these shell non-profits to keep them at an arm's length tell donors to give money to them call people to work with them tell their bishops and you know people to refer to them for various reasons whether it's apologetics or lgbt stuff but but then to have it at arm's length and then if they need to cut them off or shut them down or distance themselves you know there's never any accountability there's never any explanation it's just start north star start something else as a replacement and these people all just kind of get forgotten and on the one hand it's brilliant legally and from a pr perspective and even from a financial perspective and there's something that's just always bothered me it's kind of shady and dishonest it's super shady it's super shady evergreen is telling us the church is fine with us the church loves us and and whatever green tells my mom is um these studies that are coming out against conversion therapy there are being done by gay men who are into psychology and they want to just prove that they are correct by living their gay lifestyle so you can't trust those studies you need to trust us because we are trying to make it work with what the church obviously the church is true this is the path the church wants us to follow to get married get eternal families there has to be a way to make it work so of course the apa and all the psychology associations they are filled with gay people uh both atheists and atheists yeah and and they're changing the rules and changing the the manuals to make make it look like homosexuality is a normal thing when it's not it's a whole persecution complex that the world hates god's law the world hates mormons the world hates righteousness and so and so the mental health professions out to get mormons and you know evil is behind the normalization of of a gay quote i'll say gay lifestyle in quotes yeah and i just want to say as someone who spent six plus years of my life immersed in the literature the least credible studies were the ones done by um by north star evergreen by evergreen by jonah by exodus because there were mental health professionals doing studies on the effectiveness of conversion therapy end of reparative therapy but those were the lead they had they would only recruit from believing religious members they they would those samples were extremely biased they wouldn't seek to get a broader sample size that would draw from diverse populations and they would never show the follow-up of of how effective these things were six months later 12 months later two years later five years later because you know when when you're like you her we need to get your story but when you're a young impressionable gay religious person and all your family and your clergy and your community are all pressuring you to go through conversion therapy one you're gonna do it and two you're gonna tell them all that it was amazing and that it cured you and so if you just recruit from that sample of the ones who are in it and you just ask them immediately after they go through some conversion therapy how was it it was great i'm cured i'm fixed right and then you don't do any follow-ups that's a dishonest and an ineffective sample right if you don't work really hard to say what about the people that went through conversion and reparative therapy five years ago and 10 years ago are they still straight did it really cure them did the treatment last or did they just become gay and then leave the church well none of their studies showed any of that kind of longitudinal impact and so it was broadly known that those studies that supported conversion and reparative therapy were amongst the least credible in the social science realm not because there was this bias but because we were we knew about by then the depression the suicide that was all starting to emerge and we knew that there were very high stakes and the divorce rates for you know we knew that there were very high stakes involved so it wasn't that we were trying to push some secular agenda right it was that we were trying to get to the truth of the evidence and that's why bill bradshaw reached out to me and we even started my phd study was because we really wanted to get to the bottom of the truth and that's why when we did our study we recruited from evergreen we recruited from north star we recruited from everywhere because good science recruits from everywhere not just the subpopulations that are gonna yeah that are gonna advocate for your position so i apologize that we've gone on this rabbit trail a little bit but i think it's necessary i think it's important for giving some context for for what you were because i'm bewildered that you had an experience with evergreen as late as what year 2012 yeah because by then they were really on their way out yeah so it's but but then there's the international effect of like well things may change in utah in the united states but oftentimes the impact of these things persist even until now oh it's just a couple years ago my mom told me like oh no evergreen didn't disappear they just merged with north star they still hold to their beliefs and i was my mom i don't know if she still believes it but pretty recently she told me she still thinks that what they're saying is true yeah um so let's jump to your experience i'm sorry no i think i think it's great and something else something else i wanted to say is that evergreen would use these manuals written by spencer w kimball about how homosexuality had and could be changed how it develops and what could be changed right right right and it has the church the church stamp like right yeah so of course like we we have to trust evergreen like there here are the this written by pro a prophet who is talking about homosexuality and what was kimball's view on how it almost uh kimball taught that mainly mainly mainly his approach was homosexuality can be cured through prayer through going on a mission and to finally marrying a woman and that's the way to go but also that it's developed by by masturbation oh yes by it by abuse by a by a distant father and an overbearing mother right no science behind that right yeah but is that was that part of it yeah that's part of it that's what yeah and a lot of these manuals and pamphlets had the church stamp of approval so yeah just can't get away from that um and anyway so they my mom buys a lot of books a lot of literature from evergreen one of them i think was voices of hope uh mansfield's book yeah they sent her a book published right that's her book i didn't read that one i don't think uh but they sent her literature for her and literature for me um and the literature that i it was for me i remember there was this workbook that i had just to go through and it was just kind of explained going through a gay man's life and like how you were bullied in in elementary school and it was true yeah and how your dad was distant you have bad communication with your your parents so it's not really true and yeah and the fact that you're attracted to man it's it's mostly related to the fact that you look up to them and then that later develop into an attraction that we can if we can improve your relationships with men then we can reverse that unnatural attraction that appeared because of your distant relationships with men unhealthy relationship with men and very close relationship with with women um so yeah that's the workbook and then my mom says tells evergreen um i i well they tell her about conversion therapy tell her what it is and she's she says well i want i i need the best conversion therapist that there is um available and i think they tell her well you'll have to wait for a couple months because he's booked out but um this there's this therapist who is the godfather of conversion mormon conversion therapy his name is david matheson and he can do wonders um so my mom's like okay let's do it and we're paying for it for for this therapy that um i think it started every every week first and then it went out every other week we did it through skype and i knew english because i went to bilingual school so i could communicate with him it was a really hard time because i would come from school every day and my mom would be crying the first weeks after they found out i was gay she would just we'd just eat lunch and she's crying and i could tell she's been crying and so after reading some of the literature i got convinced like okay this thing actually can get cured maybe i mean i i love the church i like the church maybe i can make it work um i can definitely well i can try this and they're saying it works it must work we're paying a lot of money for it um so i went back to my friends who are not members and tell them hey i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this therapy stuff um they kind of laughed and said like there's no way how are you you can't change you can't just change to from gay to straight i was like no i think it can really work i i'm gonna really try this so i need you to support me and my friends were like okay fine so they'll be supportive and so i started doing the therapy uh yes what did the therapy entail so the therapy was um it was mo it's mostly talk therapy just going through my past life getting over trauma about me and my dad uh distant relationship and my not a lot of it a lot of goals of like okay maybe you should stop hanging out with women that much your friends try to make them more straight men that was really hard for me because most of my friends were girls my parents would really police that i was not just hanging out with girls that i was really trying to hang out with guys it's pretty that's probably the one some of the most traumatic parts of it was the just this constant um being constantly thinking that okay i have to be more with guys i have and and this thing that was uncomfortable for me to have to do it um and and then a lot of the therapy with uh when we would talk was um i mean i i showed you the the the spreadsheet we do that we would do this um constantly if you want to explain more of it i honestly i can't was thinking about a guy that i was attracted to and do this kind of exercises to try to um i don't know how to explain it but this is how i understand try to see the guy more like as a brother rather than someone that i should be attracted to i guess i don't know um i don't know if you've seen the the she how how would you explain what what was he trying to do yeah so uh you know this is just my understanding but there's there's all sorts of things super wrong and unethical about what what you were put through and not not to hate on anyone but i did get a phd in this and so i i have strong feelings about it number one is there's no no psychological basis for an ideology of of same-sex sexuality or origin of same-sex sexuality being rooted in a distant father or an overbearing mother because what mormon kid doesn't have a father that's so busy working and serving in the church that he's felt is distant and what what stay-at-home mom isn't super involved in her kids lives and if that were true all mormon boys would be gay and so that not only does that not explain it and that's illogical there's no scientific basis for it so to have a psychological or a medical intervention that's got literally no scientific backing on its face is unethical right so that's that's the first problem the second is it's ignoring even in the 1910s it's ignoring the emerging science which started in the 1990s or later that there's a some there's genetic associations with being gay there's hormonal influences in the womb and it's clearly by the mid 2000s bill bradshaw was already presenting as a byu biology professor at byu he's talking about the biological origins of same-sex sexuality and so you know we we know that it's got a biological origin that they're you know they've done twin studies they've done left-handedness studies they've done brain scans and and genetic studies and they're realizing that a birth order studies and all of these emerging scientific studies are showing uh this is a biological thing right and and conversion therapy but by the mid 2000 to 2010s we know that that conversion therapy doesn't work there's enough evidence coming out that this stuff is just like a um it's like a revolving door where they come in they go through the therapy they say they're great and then they leave and go out and they're not changed um so there's that there's the there's the financial cost and the financial burden to you and your family there's the pathologizing you know the the the dsm takes away the the pathological stigma of same-sex sexuality by like 1973. so here we are like 30 40 years later and it's something that's actually known generally and understood all the mental health associations the psychiatric association of the american psychiatric association the american psychological association the licensed clinical social work association the american counselors association the american medical association by the 2010s they've all condemned they've all acknowledged that it's a normative healthy variation of human the human experience that being same-sex sexuality and that by by they've all got built into their code of ethics a standard that conversion and reparative therapy is ineffective and or damaging now there isn't a lot there isn't as much science behind that as we all would have liked and that's partly why bill bradshaw and i did our study but the fact that mental health professionals that dave matheson is a licensed medical professional is developing a treatment that on its face is unethical by the mental health standards of the time that's a problem right yeah that's a problem yep but then the other problem is one we've already acknowledged and this is kind of letting out a secret but it's super important to acknowledge this dave matheson was gay he was in a mixed orientation marriage and since then like pretty much every other advocate of conversion therapy during the 90s and 2000s and 2010s he ends up coming out as gay leaving his wife and acknowledging that very little of the therapies ever really helped anyone just like with exodus international just like with jonah just like with you know josh and lolly weed you know the church wants you know there's this huge draw within conservative religions to advance damaging therapies and techniques and then to um and then just like a person of color within mormonism is going to be celebrated for being a black mormon who's faithful oh look how great that is yes the church has a racist past but look there's kwaku you know he loves the church and he's black that same sort of dynamic happens with gay people in the church where you know one viable career option is to be that gay therapist who advocates for staying in the church and being faithful and then starts having journey into manhood retreats and reparative therapy techniques and saying hey i'm gay but i make it work and you end up making a living if you look at ty mansfield he sells book contracts the deseret book he recruits people through evergreen and then north star into journey into manhood which he was leading he gets invited he gets indirect funding through these non-profits and north star the church starts funneling money into north star or having donors funnel money in the north star it becomes a livelihood for ty his reputation and his wife danielle his reputation starts to grow he starts to get invited to conferences he gets a gig at byu or he teaches there and and all of a sudden um he's reputation his livelihood his ego whatever is starting to become bolstered and enhanced by the church's investment in him as a spokesperson for like hey you can be gay and marry a woman and be healthy and happy and believe in jesus and so there's these conflicts of interest that emerge that that support a dean bird before ty mansfield and then a david mathison before ty mansfield and then a ty mansfield now and maybe ty will be the one unicorn that makes it all work but we saw with josh and lolly weed that ended up josh ended up saying i'm gay and then leaves lolly and now he's living quote the gay lifestyle who knows maybe ty willer won't be that cautionary tale again but it doesn't matter whether ty ends up you know rediscovering that he has stuff on the side or he's doing other things the church will always be replacing the josh's and the dave mathis and the dean birds and the time mansfields of the past they will always just find a new crop of new advocates for being gay or lesbian and staying faithful to the mormon church without ever apologizing to all the people that got hurt for all the expenses that were made and for all the marriages that were destroyed and all the people who were psychologically damaged by being sold hope and that's what voices of hope is and that's what evergreen was and that's what northstar is you're selling hope to people when what you're offering them and what you're charging them for and what they're paying for are are treatments that are unethical that go against science that are expensive and that and the people make major life decisions on marriage kids livelihood they make all missions they make all these decisions based on the promise of hope that is completely bankrupt psychologically and you know from a mental health perspective and and and sadly your parents because the church was influencing your parents then your parents were were encouraging you yeah and so you're you're thinking i'm sick i'm broken i'm defective i'm gonna go tell my friends you guys need to help me because now i'm going through this therapy and i need your support because i'm sick i'm broken i'm defective and and this is my only hope to not have my life ruined so that's my that's my rant yeah anything you want to disagree with no yeah i think you nailed it yeah you nailed it um something that they really want the the to do evergreen wanted what to do before you start the therapy um is really indoctrinate you into the idea that you are broken that you are that you're not supposed to be gay that it's not natural it's not normal and therefore you need to want to change they really want you to say that you want to change david matheson won't start the therapy unless you are the one saying i am we i have an undesired same sex attract attraction um and that's the whole thing so so then they can come back today and say well all these people they wanted to change um they came up to us and they wanted the therapy or we shouldn't make the therapy illegal because people that come to us they want to do it so why why should we make it illegal freedom of speech allows us to keep doing it but they they convinced me they convinced me that i needed to want to do it i remember at the beginning i was like how in the world am i going to be able to not to want to change something that i like how am i why should i dislike something that i like like how is that even possible it's like saying i don't know yeah yeah i i love bacon yeah i hate bacon yeah i i or i i like chocolate but i need to want to hate chocolate how do you learn to hate chocolate right yeah so i mean to for me was the literature that that it was just reading the preparation for the for the therapy was um reading that that that's not what i'm supposed to be and that gay people are sinister people that get aids and that are have horrible lifestyles and that are not blessed by god and that um there's no there's no happiness into that lifestyle it's terrible well yeah and part of what's so insidiously unethical there are two things one is this is all done in the name of god so it's like well god and spencer be killing boy k packer they all said it so it's not just therapists and dave matheson and evergreen and your parents it's god himself through the prophets or condemning who you are at your core and that takes it to a whole no extra level of unethical right yep um but the second thing is that there's there's a serious lack of informed consent because the church knows there's this revolving door of all these men that say they've been cured and then five ten years later they're you know they're not able to sustain the effects of either a mixed orientation i know people today who are on the north star website i was looking at their website yesterday who are like have their stories and the voices of hope section that i know for sure they are fooling around with guys yeah or or have left the church or have you know ended up getting in committed relationships but they're still there on the website on the north star website you go if a new gay kid goes will hear the story about this guy who's making it work when in reality he's like out of the church or just sleeping around around yeah yeah yeah yeah and when we talk about the second thing that's super insidious regarding informed consent is the mormon church will never ever tell a gerardo who's 16 in mexico okay we're presenting to you evergreen we're telling your therapists and your parents to put you in front of evergreen but we're not going to tell you that tens of thousands of gay mormons before you have tried these therapies and it ended up not only not working but in some cases was fatal right right and we propped up all these role models like dean bird like dave matheson like josh weed and it failed for all of them and all these tens of thousands of people before failed marriages suicides whatever but we're not gonna ever tell our new crop of young gay mormons and lesbians that that the risks and the harm and the damage is really severe and when we i just did a tick tock on informed consent not only do you have to tell people you know that they not only have to have no coercion in what they're agreeing to which you didn't you had coercion your parents and your family and your church and god yep you you also have to have all the information you have to understand the risks and benefits to have full informed consent you need to be explained the risks and benefits the church knows the risks and benefits by 2010 2015 by 2021 but they never ever offer the risks and benefits they just keep recycling a new generation of advocates who who all end up washing out of the program or have miserable lives by staying in it but either way there's never any informed consent in terms of the risks and benefits yeah did you get any informed about the risks and benefits of what you were going to do they were telling us that this is the most amazing thing that that all the apas are wrong because they're it's the apa is full with gay people who are changing the dsm and and voting to to say homosexuality is good but in reality we are the ones that are right yeah what there's no informed consent at all yeah um and these people who i mean people may be able to say well evergreen doesn't exist anymore these people who were in evergreen they're now in north star and they still to this day promote those ideas i know that because at least one of them keeps contact with my mom and tells her about it tells her that that that your study or like other other people's study are bogus and that you're just trying to prove that that um homosexuality is is good i know at any cost yeah and there's this whole culture i haven't even mentioned this of this retreat called journey into manhood yeah and my my david matheson my therapist he was a co-author with another person of that of the journey into manhood and anti-mansfield has been a part of that but basically it's this idea of all these men going away for a weekend to southern utah or in the forest and by being with other men by by doing a lot of these exercises and psychological techniques with other men and then this is where it gets really really unethical holding other men embracing other men for long periods of time even being naked with other men or getting naked in front of other men too yeah that somehow that's you know and if you just embrace a man you know as a gay man possibly naked and hold them for a long time but not feed the sexual arousal that somehow that's going to cure you of your gayness and so generations of men have gone to these journey into manhood you do macho things chop wood throw the football be macho hold men in a naked embrace for long periods of time somehow that's all going to be a mishmash that cures you of your gayness and what often happens is you just hook up on the side or you know it doesn't last or you're just you're getting your part of your sexual or emotional needs met from these retreats to to make it possible for you to try and stay in a mixed orientation marriage and there's a great interview we just did with kyle ashworth where he talks about the north star gay naked cuddling in hotels with married mormon men whose wives aren't even told that they're doing these sorts of things it's this twisted warped unethical i hate to say a gay mormon underground that still is thriving in 2021 there's a north star conference like this weekend i think in salt lake city the thai mansfield is leading we've known about these things for over a decade and nobody cares nobody's talking about it and ty mansfield is still funded by the church i think he teaches at byu and north star is still supported by the church and it's the go-to organization for fair morning the church is sending him to teach uh seminary teachers remember mark that's right yeah mark osland said that ty mansfield was sent to train mormon seminary teachers about how to deal with gay youth and it's just a corrupt rotten unethical seedy anti-science foreign that's what's just hitting me right now is that when you center yourself in an unscientific world view that yeah maybe evolution it's not real or the earth was formed from different planets and you just have such a religion based around like folk magic that has evolved into this very conservative um ultra orthodox version of of this religion and it just seems like yes that's the outgrowth of being so anti-science they're just throwing crap at the wall seeing if gay cuddling parties maybe that'll work like nothing about ever just accepting people and going with the science that like you were saying earlier about like this is we don't exactly know the reasons that people have these sexualities it's not satan for sure like they won't accept that because that would go against everything that all the other prophets have taught that's not even on the table right like they can't just accept it i i hope that there's some changes happening because this is really i'm a straight woman but i'm like in pain listening to what these people have is this a little bit newer for you stuff did you know i mean i used to be ultra conservative didn't understand two years ago just two years ago i i still i still believe that being gay was a choice two years ago so it's really painful that how close not closeted sorry what a bubble my mind was in um just assuming that the proclamation of the family that's what it is that's what god said it is and you gotta get in line with it this is god's way there's no other way yeah and you you know there are a lot of postmortems that like don't care about lgbt issues or like even still carry their anti-lgbt stuff into their post-mormonism and i just want to say even if you don't feel like you're an ally to lgbtq issues or you don't feel passionate about lgbtq issues these issues strike at prophetic fallibility right number one because you you you just you've got all these this decades of declarations about how evil and satanic and perverted and wrong being lgbtq is then you've got modern general authorities backtracking on all that because they've realized how much damage they've done that is a huge important illustration of the lack of mormon prophetic infallibility but then even if you don't care about lgbt the lgbtq causes you have to recognize the huge generations of psychological and physical and emotional damage done to lgbtq mormons to the women and men that they married and to all the kids that became collateral damage in these families even if you don't care about lgbtq people care about all the damage that's been done and the glaring obvious reality that shows that these you know there are a lot of people that come on tick tock or or youtube and they're like oh come on man religions are all imperfect but let people have their beliefs and why are you why are you hating on religious people you know just let people do their own thing mormons are nice people yeah and there is a sub-segment of these populations that are being destroyed that are being killed that are being damaged and you know the worst of it is all the lgbtq suicides but stopping short of that there's all the depression all the anxiety um all the destroyed families it's just it's like a modern holocaust i hate to use that word it's a psychological and a moral holocaust that that we're just starting to emerge from i'm sorry gerardo we've hijacked your story no no i i think you believe in 100 i believe in what you're saying yeah i and i agree with that 100 yeah yeah it's it's sad today to have family especially from my husband's side just saying um well church leaders just make mistakes like how how can you just dismiss it and be like well church leaders just make mistakes don't criticize the church just i mean i don't criticize you for being gay so just don't talk about my church i was damaged by this and it's not as simple as church leaders make mistakes church leaders are telling us today that we need to listen to them and the truth is truth and that they won't teach us anything that is not truth um yeah it's just just very sad there's huge externalities to them getting it wrong yeah there's a suicide epidemic there's broken families yeah so as you're going through this gerardo what's it like for you going through dave matheson's conversion therapy well at the beginning i was like okay this is gonna work and it was really hard to have my mom ask me constantly like after the meeting how did it go how's it going how are you feeling what happened and how do you measure that stuff how do i tell well i guess i'm 10 less gay today like so i would just be very quiet and be like i don't know i think it went it went good it went good and she's spending all this money yeah and she's very frustrated that i'm not telling her so she so they're kind of like policing me my parents and kind of like thinking okay is he actually doing and putting an effort into this a lot of conversations of like oh maybe you're not putting enough effort uh maybe you should do more you should be doing more and pretty fast pretty quickly i realized that it was not working that he was bogus but what really affected me was having to have to have to hide even more from my parents that um that i mean this this part that they were spending all this money and i'm like i i knew it's not working but then what else could i do and there's eternal consequences for them it's not just like right you know yeah there's social consequences there's embarrassment to your parents and then you won't be with them in the afterlife so now their eternal family is being jeopardized and that's what mormons live for yeah that's a lot of pressure for you yeah yeah and later i i decided okay i'll go back to plan a i'll just pretend this is working go on my mission go byu and then be gay because this is definitely not working so you just lie yeah and say you're you're back on board you're back on the team yes was the culture of your house was this like the only thing that defined your personality growing up that like the only thing people that's kind of how it sounds right now to me that like the only thing that was being talked about was you undoing your gayness or did you have like other things you talked about at the dinner table or is it like how much of this was like the the main topic of conversation in your house we didn't talk too much about it i mean this is what i remember the most because it was what affected me the most um but at some point right like um as i realized it was not gonna work i just went back to having fun and having fun in high school and i can't remember i don't think i really did stuff a lot with the guys after but just went back more careful yeah yeah how do things wrap up with dave matheson um just stop doing like i was gonna go on my mission so we just said i'm fixed i'm good i mean what well okay so here's the thing so something that had before my parents found out i was gay something that really made them really proud of me was that i had told them that i was not going to date girls because i was going to go on my mission and the church recommends not dating before going on your mission so i'm gonna be ultra faithful and not date girls um so i didn't date girls and i was not encouraged by david to date girls because i was gonna go on a mission so how do you measure that there's any change um so there was not like a completion okay your change uh well he would ask me like how would you rate your attractions towards men and i at the beginning when i thought okay i'll try this i'll say like i would say yeah i think it's working but then as i realized it was it definitely didn't work i lied to him and i told him yeah i think i'm less attracted to men and blah blah and i think this is working and i'm doing great and yeah so i asked for like a number like one to ten i can't remember yeah i can't remember exactly but yeah he would ask me like about specific guys that i had talked to him before and how attracted i am towards them now and compared to before and stuff like that yeah and he's so just to so dave his name is david matthews and he's that famous kind of got a bald head yeah that guy that eventually came out just a couple years ago just a couple years ago okay so he probably liked talking about guys with you hot guys with you i think he really believed that he was doing good work i don't think he was trying to deceive people i mean he's the creation of the lds church he it's not yeah he's a victim right of the system right yeah yeah um good in kudos to dave matheson for eventually coming out yeah and admitting you were wrong and you heard a lot of people yeah and i'm glad i i've seen him at a couple equality utah events and he's he's dating i think he's yeah finding happiness and joys and i'm happy for him zach and i had lunch with him recently yeah wow he's happy um anyway so okay so i'm ready getting ready to go on my mission and um and send my papers and yeah my parents are happy that i i'm we're fixed yeah you turned it off i don't know i don't think he they ever thought because because it was always a recommendation by david that i would touch base with him when i came back uh to see how everything was gonna work out once i i start dating girls um so so my parents never thought okay you're fixed you're good enough to go on your mission like you're fixed enough to go on your mission but never um so um all right so i was called to mexico city which i was very disappointed about because i really wanted to come to the us my best friend was called to the u to california so and my papers came a little earlier than his i was pretty jealous that i was going to go to mexico city how far away was mexico city from your house um it's a it's about 16 hours driving but it's only like an hour and 45 minutes playing my my my dad's family still lives in mexico city so i mean it's true it's huge yeah so the part where i served i hadn't really been most most of it um but um but yeah i've been i've been to mexico city and you spoke fluent english by this point right and you uh yeah my english was pretty good not as good as it is right now but i mean yeah still did bilingual school so um so yeah my english was good and it was a good experience and also like a very hard experience part of i i had decided that i was not gonna tell uh my mission president or anyone that i was gay um but i also knew there was a lot of things that i had repented about and so you know how there's this meetings in at the mtc where they really grilled you that if you have any sins you should confess and that's hard for me but i mean i'm pretty i think i'm pretty psychologically strong so i just went through it i was like yeah i'm not gonna confess and when i mean when a kid confesses it's serious because oftentimes they're sent home oh yes and it's super embarrassing and shameful and the kid just just had a big party the whole ward and community and all extended family are like having a big banquet and sending him off on his mission and everybody's excited you go to the mtc and just you know it can be just a couple of days to a couple of weeks and all of a sudden you're confessing because there's this they've got the corkscrews and they're just screwing you with the pressure to confess then you confess and it's like you're safe no you confess and there's a decent chance you're going to be sent home shamed with your tail between your legs and everybody knows when a missionary comes home after a week or two it's because they had sex or something like it and and didn't confess it and then they have to do this probationary period where they wait for months to then see if they're worthy to go back out again and it's this huge shame parade yeah that you avoided by lying yes yes yes so congratulations it's not happy for you it's not only this big conference is what they ask people it's uh then later you have a 101 with uh with the branch president and he asked you specifically about pornography and masturbation and all these things like and looking into your eyes and yeah there's this mormon teaching that mormon leaders have the spirit of discernment where they can use the holy ghost and their priesthood powers to look into your eyes and stare intently and know what's on your heart and know so you may as well confess because they're seeing it anyway yeah is that what you're referring to but you were wise to that yeah you knew that that was poppycock well no i kind of i was nervous but i mean i was still gonna try to not confess it's like when you said earlier about going and doing baptisms with the temple right like yeah you knew that like i got away with this they're not going to know there's no spirit of disorder yeah it was kind of like on and off but the mtc is like all that those thoughts on steroids turbo yeah what's the what's the the context of that they say that if you don't confess you won't have the spirit throughout your mission and then yeah salvation is lost because you didn't have the spirit yeah yeah yeah and then if you if you haven't confessed and repented of everything you won't have the spirit and then you won't be able to teach and then families that would have had obtained their salvation and been able to go to the celestial kingdom are going to end up in the terrestrial the celestial kingdom or the mormon equivalent of hell because you couldn't stop masturbating because you didn't repent of touching boobs or kissing a gay guy when you were growing up so it's a huge guilt and shame where it's eternal consequence divinely mandated where you're not just hurting yourself you're keeping other people from their salvation yep as a teenager that's keeping your future that's painful but then something happened at the mtc um i i um we were in one of the classes and then the instructor asked us to oh and i was also called the district leader at the mg yeah of course so i was like i mean they they you got a leadership calling yeah which meant god was happy with you right right um so we're in this class and the instructor tells us okay now you're gonna kneel and you're gonna pray to god to tell you that the book of mormon is true or that the church is true or whatever like you need you're gonna have a spiritual experience right here right now so everyone kneeled i kneeled and i had my scriptures and i knew about my mom's story of opening the scriptures and finding this like supe super inspiring scripture that she she she wanted that she needed um and i had tried that before in as a youth i had tried to do that before and it never worked every time i opened it was something random that had nothing to do with my life but that one time i i was kneeling and then praying to god to tell me if if it was true and if i was doing the right thing or whether i can't remember exactly and then i opened the scripture about that point i've never read the book of mormon in its entirety um i mean i've been to seminary but never like from back to back and there was this scripture that i don't know how i missed it because it's one of the most popular scriptures um but i can stop is one of the most it's one of the most popular scriptures but i don't know how it never heard of it and i opened it and it's this scripture on ether that talks about weaknesses and if you come to the lord he'll make your weaknesses strong strong so it was this super powerful experience because i mean i'm gay i have a weakness um and the lord is talking to me he's telling me the book of mormon is real um so so that's that that did two things that gave me a testimony of the the church is true and it also it also made me realize that the church the the god had forgiven me um even though i i hadn't confessed so i didn't need to confess because god had forgiven me because otherwise they they're telling me right now here on the mtc that i can't feel this bird if i not clean so i must be clean because i failed [Laughter] they need to think that through a little bit um anyway so that's i just have to say i i'm probably too old those of you who are 50 year old are going to remember kind of the magic eight ball is this little toy that you would shake and had water in it and this little like octagon kind of cube inside and you would shake it and it would say yes or you'd shake it and it would say no or you'd shake it and it would say maybe and it was just this fun little thing where you with your friends you'd ask it a question shake it and then it would say yes go do that or whatever right it's a magic eight ball that's kind of what your mom did and what you did yeah this like this notion of like i have a thing i'll bring it to the scriptures i'll i'll randomly find a page and then see what it says it's kind of like i call it mormon magic eight ball it's kind of a superstitious thing but you know it ends up feeling super powerful when you just happen to turn to the right page yeah and of course god must have led you there right yeah yeah i mean what better scripture for a gay man than that one there i don't think there's a better one worse it depends on your perspective yeah yeah at that point in that so in that in that yeah miraculous yeah um so yeah arrived to my mission my mission president he was he's mexican um he was a 70 before being a mission president but he never served a mission he was a convert um and super smart guy he reminded me in a lot of ways to my dad like knows a lot about the folksy doctrine of mormonism and and super knowledgeable about these scriptures like super super knowledgeable and great speaker amazing speaker i yes and this he has this eyes that like he when he looks at you like he this super interesting gray almost gray eyes yeah they're super penetrating yeah so i was a little scared at the beginning so my trainer had this really bad was very remorseful of having been a bad missionary before he didn't really know the language um yeah it kind of seemed to me like he had just been partying a group until that point yep so it was a gringo utah who had been a disobedient missionary he would yeah because he was in the northwest but he they had to split the missions and ended up on the east okay mission yeah fresh start yeah the greeny yeah yeah and um so he didn't know the lessons very well or the language um man so i took um how do you say i i just um took the responsibility and did most of it i contacted people when we taught i taught like 90 percent of the lessons um and uh pretty much trained myself well uh we had a alright relationship i think in some ways he kind of sometimes got would get mad that i was i was just taking the lead way too much because there's this idea in mormon missions called senior companion and junior companion and a senior companion someone who's been on the mission longer junior companion usually as someone who's been here less sometimes when a missionary has been out a long time and he's being punished or shamed a more uh seasoned missionary will be demoted to junior companion over a missionary that it that was newer to the mission but generally speaking the senior companion has been there longer they're in charge the junior companion especially if they're green or new defers to the decisions and the leadership of the senior companion yep but you're saying in effect you were you were senior companion even though you were green yeah pretty much yeah right yep yeah but it went it went all right and then after that i did my two cycles with him and then i the mission president made me train a missionary um so this is a promotion yeah promotion and then after him i trained again and another jog high school from from utah um and he was like this massive huge huge tall guy um and he comes to the mission and he one of the first things he tells me is like just so you know i don't i don't i don't believe that tithing it's a thing like i don't believe we should be paying tithing i was like wait what and and just stuff random stuff like that he would tell me like uh yeah when i was a when i was at the mtc or something like that i prayed about doctrine covenants section 132 and god told me that that didn't come for him from him i was like there's no way what is this guy saying like how is this a thing that you don't believe in section 132 you have to believe in the whole scripture you can't just pick and choose that's called a cafeteria mormon um and you don't believe in tithing but we have to teach tithing and we need to make people pay tithing um and just a lot of stuff like that but we got along well we had our differences but he ended up being the only missionary who i came out to uh he i think he asked me like hey kind of like he really was trying to get it out of me and then i just told him and by that point i i i was also feeling like okay i can be more open because i was like keeping all these feelings and what i had gone through and the fact that i had realized that conversion therapy didn't work and that my plan was i was going to finish this mission and go be gay at byu um that was my plan still so so he being a progressive mormon i didn't know what that was but i guess he was progressive mormon i was able to come out from utah yeah i was able to come out to him and he he was super loving accepting and hear me out heard my story um i told him about the guys that i had had a crush done in the past so he was very understanding and um and his own stuff and loving yeah yeah we all do um and yeah that was what year is this 2013 yeah like i'm thinking about when i was a missionary and again this was in the late 80s yeah if if if a missionary come out to me as having been gay i would not have taken that well i would have i would have number one thought ooh that's bad and then i would have said whoa when i dress what are you gonna be looking at me and are you liking me i would not have had any maturity or respect for for what was going on now now the the year for you was what 2013. so i mean yeah this is like literally i'm thinking of mormon stories like this is like when the essays are starting to come out and the mormons and gays website yeah so he had read denver snuffer stuff uh he knew oh wow so he was an awake and awakened intellectually progressive mormon yeah yeah he was less active uh before going on his mission and then all of a sudden decided to go on his mission he'd be a super popular guy in high school um kind of a smart seasoned mature kid yeah yeah that's so cool you had that experience yeah packer put out a pamphlet where he's talked about one missionary coming up giving giving missionaries it was a talk on general conference to punch other gay mormons if they ever if you have to punch him i'm not going to i'm not going to fault you for for hitting a guy if he's gay it would be bad for a general authority to do that but it's fine if you you do that yeah but yeah yeah i'm so glad you had that guy i mean obviously i i i came out to him until i felt like it was safe right here right um and yeah it was great i i still love him and he we have do you think he'll listen to yeah he will yeah oh good he knows mormon stories he knows with john delaney that's cool yeah he he still believes and progressive uh mormon i even though he was my companion had progressive views he didn't try he didn't told me about polygamy or like i i still was very um not knowing about any of that stuff and he still had a bunch of books brought for a bunch of books from the scholar from byu what's his name nibbly yeah a bunch of books from nebley and the book of mormon all the the book book of mormon series from nibely farms stuff which is the predecessor so even though he was progressive he still enjoyed and loved nibbly and just orthodox um stuff kind of mormon code scholarship yeah which is pseudo scholarship right right it feels intelligent yeah i remember i was really trying to want to read that and like i don't understand any of this no one does yeah i i first thought it was because english is my second language so maybe that's why but then i hear rfm saying that he's read it and he doesn't understand it either so uh we all thought he nibbly was brilliant it turns out he was just crazy and because he was so incoherently crazy we all assumed it was because he was brilliant and we just weren't smart enough turns out he was just incoherent and crazy right yeah um anyway so weirdly that's when i started getting really into uh into deep folksy mormon doctrine and doctrines of salvation and started collecting books and a big fascination with jehovah witnesses i started learning a lot about what jehovah witnesses where about their beliefs there were a lot of them in the area so i would love to debate them on the streets i actually baptized a couple people um who were either former jehovah witnesses or who were being taught by really by jehovah's witnesses i'm about to get baptized um and i got to preach some elders from the jehovah witnesses and and big fascination with them and my fascination was rooted in the fact that we are in the true religion and i have to prove that they are wrong and and it's super easy to prove they're wrong because their teachings have been changing and but mormon doctrine does not change since we i mean our doctrine comes from adam like all the way back we haven't changed anything um and everything joseph smith thought we still believe today and yeah we don't change stuff that's joseph fielding smith it's just the gospel's eternal yeah jesus you know you know well and everything had changed before joseph smith but that's you just tell everybody nothing ever changes and it doesn't matter if things are changing all the time you just get in your mind the chur the church never changes god never changes but if it's polygamy or you know blacks in the priesthood or the temple ceremony any ladies it's all been changing every yeah everything has changed you would bought that yeah yeah and and i would not jokes witnesses yeah yeah they changed and i would collect their old books to show them look here is your your doctrine changed and to be like oh crap so it got to a point as a zone leader later like where i missionaries especially sister missionaries would call us and ask us about where scriptures were or about certain doctrines or questions they had and i was the one responding to their questions like i became this like super knowledgeable guy and still and loving the church believing it was true preaching to people baptizing people and but still in the back of my mind knowing that i was gonna go back and be gay it's so compartmentalized man but missions are so intense they're so hard that it's just hard for me to imagine you being the standout missionary gospel scholar and the whole time you're thinking i'm not going to be able to stick with this and it's true like that's some serious compartmentalization yep yeah and my dad was my parents were really proud of me i mean i was a zone leader really fast um for my dad that's a big thing having leadership positions in the church it's that's how you show that you are actually actually faithful and and and a good member yeah your mom's like that money with dave matheson was the best money i've ever had right probably um and okay so right when i arrived from to my mission baptisms had the dramatically declined um because the the i think it was like the first week i was on my mission the the area presidency set a rule that everyone that was to get baptized needed to go at least five sundays uh to church that's five weeks like psych you're only in one area for six for six weeks and then there's changes they may not change you or move you but um so you when you get to an area you gotta find that's when you get to find the first week you get to find all the people that you're gonna later get baptized um so it just became really difficult and declined so soon after that the area presidency set these goals super super high goals of lessons and a goal of one ba one baptism every week it became the motto in mexico every companionship ship has to have one baptism every week what yeah at least one baptism every week if it's families it's a bonus but um that's high that's outrageous yeah so there's this goal for all the missionaries in all mexico to baptize at least one time a week um and i mean there's a lot of shame if you're not doing it you you're not being faithful or you are not being super obedient um so yeah it was hard and i didn't really do it until i was a zone leader uh i was not able to do it and it had it depended a lot on the area you were serving too totally yeah yeah um so i was by the way the more poor and desperate the area the more likely it would be you'd have a baptism right yep he's nodding his head yet yes yes the more wealthy and affluent and educated the area yes yes anyway so i i was his own leader then the president moved me to another area and he and it was a super hard area to baptize that's where he sent he would send all his aps after being aps he would send them to be zone leaders in that area because you're his own leader and you're in a super hard area that's like it's a ward not a branch because it used to be a huge ward and now it's a ward with 10 people attending every week including the bishop's family that's nothing that's smaller than a branch yeah but it still was it was not even considered a branch because it used to be a big word but just many people just so many people winning active and for those who are new to mormon stories or have never been mormon this is just a brief segue i'll just say my very first mormon stories episode ever episode number one is about my mission experience in guatemala where there was massive baptismal pressures to baptize and there were companionships that were baptizing 40 a month which means they weren't just baptizing once a week they were baptizing on average one a day right and the mission got up to like 700 750 baptisms a month there was a mission in chile that had over a thousand a month the vina del mar mission and so latin america mormon missionaries in latin america have this decades-long history of baptizing tons and tons and tons of eight-year-old seven-year-olds drunk people single moms whoever they can pump up the numbers baptize without lessons without discussions go to the beach and just like hey you want to follow jesus let's go get baptized get names off of tombstones like whatever you could do baptizing crazy then the church would say oh look at all the growth and look at all the numbers and there'd be new wards and new branches and new stakes and all the missions are dividing and wards and stakes are dividing and isn't it's a miracle and then you fast forward 10 20 years and you've got these wards that that they expanded too quickly they divided too quickly things got watered down and you're left a ward supposed to have 200 250 active people there were at least 300 or 400 people in the list and 10 people attending but when you do these baptismal practices in latin america and the philippines elsewhere you'll get these numbers but then it's not sustainable there's huge attrition rates 90 attrition rates usually and then you're left with these wards that should have two 250 people actively attending and there may be 10 people and it it's it's it's really decimated the church in latin america and that's what kara was referring to i actually have an episode with dr ted lyon where he talked about when he was you know a mission an mtc president a mission president and a temple president in chile holland had to go to chile elder holland and close 30 stakes collapsing them closing all these wards closing all these stakes because the church was just imploding under this fraudulent potemkintown uh expansion numerically but the but the actual lived experience of the of the latin americans in the mormon experience was was destroyed by by fraudulent statistical growth that had no underlying substance or merit to it so that's the background for kind of and this has this ebbs and flows it started with the baseball baptisms in england in the 60s which ironically elder holland was a member of the missions in the british isles when uh when the church was starting to experiment with these techniques and and so it ebbs and flows these these errors come where there's massive numerical growth i'm sure the church is experiencing this in africa right now right massive growth and then like oh my gosh this is all unsustainable and then contraction and rules about oh no now you have to be more careful and and you know cautious when you baptize people but then they'll be the aggressive mission presidents and area presidents that want expansion and want growth yeah and it's just screwing with with people in these developed countries so it's this whole seedy underbelly of unethical missionary work that's statistics driven pressure driven and it's very colonial in its nature and it's a really gross and ethical shady thing that the church has been through just google sunstone baseball baptisms michael quinn's got an amazing article maybe write that in the show notes an amazing article about how this happened in the british isles so all of that is background for you now coming into a ward that was suffering under this sort of egregious fraudulent ex statistical expansion so it's a ward that should have a couple hundred members and it has what ten ten including the bishops bishops family like we would get a church and it was just the bishop upstairs sometimes and it's a ward yeah but it speaks to the rotting of the church in latin america for for 80s and 90s it was this massive expansion i remember when mexico had like 100 stakes it was this huge deal but all of that is he riding and eroding and the church is slowly riding in latin america is that right yep yep to that point i hadn't really seen it um it's been a la la la la more evident recently but yeah i mean yeah for sure that word was tiny and obviously super hard to baptize because you're taking people who are it was not a super poor area so you're taking people to this uh church that has 10 people in it and you're telling them this is the one true church so and you're a zone leader so you have the pressure of being the example of baptizing every week to the whole zone um so i was super super frustrated okay because we didn't baptize anyone that holds that whole cycle so the the day before the changes i called the mission president and i told him hey uh president presidente i don't think zone leaders should be in this area i mean you you've tried with your former aps and they don't baptize they didn't baptize when they were here and how are you how are how are you expecting us to be um the example of the whole whole zone if we can't baptize it's just a terrible word and terrible place to um to preach and he said okay there i'll consider it and hang up and then the next day he demotes me to a minor [Laughter] you challenged priesthood authority yep that's a no-no i was so mad you imagine like okay how am i going to tell my parents hey now i'm a minor a junior a junior companion yeah sorry it's minority in spanish how many months in your mission was that over a year yeah over a year i've been i've been a song leader for eight months six oh my gosh that's shaming yeah i mean that would be people don't understand once you become a zone leader you stay a zone leader for the rest of your mission and maybe you become ap yep the only reason someone would ever be demoted from his own leaders like if they had sex with someone or like broke a serious mission rule so to be demoted to a junior not even you know like there's district there's district leader there's senior companion and then the lowest is a junior companion so yeah and that was just for giving a suggestion yeah what was that like it was horrible i felt horrible um had he been your mission personal president from the start or was it a new mission president he had been from the start he was the one who called you as a zoning early yes yes oh that must have been heartbreaking too because you probably had a good relationship with him right yeah yeah yeah oh um they didn't explain why i'm not he didn't explain why nothing oh junior companion oh well i was on that after that i kind of like was like not caring too much like i was like okay whatever like i'm mad i'm not gonna put a ton of effort anymore i'm just gonna let my senior companion take the lead whatever so on mondays i would just go uh when we would write our families i started going into like youtube and just learning more about like i mean i would justify thinking like i'm just gonna look for like i loved listening to like mcconkey's talks and hugh b brown's talks of uh the profile of a prophet and does i i had downloaded that before from youtube and got them into cds so i can but so what i started doing is at that point was i just started researching other stuff anyway so i found um i can't remember which one was first but i found your interview with what's bradshaw mine yeah oh the one about homosexuality it's a good one yeah yeah so bill bradshaw is a harvard trained biologist who believes in evolution he was a biology professor while margie and i were at byu but he also his son comes out as gay while he's a byu professor and he's been a mission president by this point he's been in state presidencies and he's a super well respected biology professor at byu who taught evolution to byu students but he became one of the early advocates like let's just say i want to say late 90s early 2000s he starts talking about the biological basis of homosexuality and by the way to this day 2021 he's still a believering mormon i'm not so sure about marge's wife but he's still believing mormon but super buttoned up harvard-trained thoughtful sensitive lover of science becomes one of the early lgbt advocates who also starts family fellowship which was like this support group for parents of gay kids in utah and he talks all about that and the sun coming out his son brett coming out we've had bret bradshaw also on mormon stories his son but but bill bradshaw is a legend in lgbtq mormon advocacy and he was the co-pi with me and my professor at utah state on all the lgbtq research that that i've done from my phd so he's a legend and he's brilliant and he's faithful and he's one of the coolest interviews i've ever done and he's a dear friend so you stumble on that interview what happens yeah i i listened to some of it probably the most impactful part was when he talks about his son's wedding and how beautiful the wedding was and how um just for him there was nothing wrong with it and he just couldn't see how a god could not be okay with with with that ceremony or wedding or whatever it was really impactful but at the same time i was like it was a really hard cognitive dissonance how is this uh former mission president byu professor saying these things this doesn't make any sense this isn't fit um so i just put it in the on the shelf i think and then i stumble upon but you loved it too yeah yeah i loved it yeah and then i stumbled upon the book of abraham video where robert rittner appears in it i can't remember what it's called but it's this video where they tell the story about the book of abraham and they just says talk about the problems with the book of abraham and that really really shook me i was like okay if the book of abraham is not a real translation then what about how how does this fit into the book of mormon translation what if that's not a translation either so for a couple weeks i was really bummed by that it was a real heart really really bad hard struggle um into um just the idea of maybe the church isn't true um super hard it was and at the end i was able to put it on the shelf but then the next change the the mission president made me an ap whoa curveball trial of faith you're rewarded after the trial yep yeah he was testing you yeah i think so i don't know um how'd that make you feel oh that's super super good super happy and so it stands for assistant to the president and you and your companion are pretty much like top missionaries yeah the whole mission looks up to you like 100 companionships 125 companionships and you're the top companionship yeah and they're looking at you and you train them and you go and visit to them and do exchanges to them and and teach them how to teach and are always on not always but you go on tours with the mission president and you get to go on the van with the mission president and learn from him super closely and teach with him um and it was a huge honor and your dad had been ap right yeah yes yeah so telling my dad i was my dad told me later that um one of the first things he did when when he found out i was an ap he called his his mission president and told him i mean in a in a patriarchy promotion is one of the most sacred things yeah yeah yeah it's validating yeah and i just became even more like faithful and obedient and like just in steroids all right and double down yeah double down and at some point i don't i can't pinpoint when but at some point during that time is when i decided i'm i have to go back home and marry a woman i have to do it like i need to keep i need to stay in the church it was i just had so many powerful experiences i think um teaching someone baptizing every week teaching a lot of people um just so many good experiences and that's i think that's a great dramatic place kind of a cliffhanger here's the cliffhanger folks like will gerardo finish his mission how will his faith uh you know crisis ensue if it does or doesn't will he end up dating girls after his mission will he go to byu idaho will he marry a woman will he marry a guy stay tuned for more from warmer stories podcasts where you'll hear the next part of gerardo's epic story is that all right is that okay to take a break yeah it's perfect yeah we can't talk about any of this during our break so that we don't ruin it yeah all right gerardo thanks this has been fun yeah all right so uh we're gonna we're gonna take a break probably end part one and then we'll come right back with uh more from gerardo's cliff hanging epic story about his mexican mormon journey stay tuned thanks everyone

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 56,049

Keywords: lds, mormon, homosexuality, lgbt, gay, lesbian

Id: Gv7vbK2ilys

Length: 224min 31sec (13471 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021